


kick on the starter

by nephropsis



Series: local foreigners [1]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Badly Described Hockey, Coming Out, Family Member Death, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Terrible Prickly Cactus Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-29
Updated: 2016-12-11
Packaged: 2018-09-03 01:43:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 43,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8691601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nephropsis/pseuds/nephropsis
Summary: In which Kent Parson plays hockey, learns that grieving isn't a cut and dried process and comes out on Twitter, not necessarily in that order.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lanyon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lanyon/gifts).



> CONTENT NOTES: KENT LOSES A FAMILY MEMBER. If this bothers you read no further. Also an additional warning for pervasive homophobia, though there will be no homophobia among main characters.
> 
> ETA I FORGOT TO BLAME AND SHAME DONYA AND LANYON FOR THIS. Lanyon for making me the trash of the thing and Donya for enabling me. Terrible. One million years dungeon.

So maybe Kent could have been smarter about it, but in his defense it’s not like it was a good secret. It might have been if Kent didn’t live in Las Vegas, where hardly anybody gives a shit about hockey, or if he was less than a few years shy of thirty and tired of the same four closet walls. Kent hasn't been properly careful in years. It’s just that nobody was really looking.

He comes out on a September morning of no particular renown. All it takes is a tweet, and all he does is post it, roll over, and go back to sleep. He’s already won the Stanley Cup twice, so who gives a rat’s ass, really? What has he got to lose?

He turns off his phone at sundown on Friday, feeds the cat and goes back to bed.

Looking back, it might have been rock bottom.

-

Eighty-two missed calls is a lot.

 Kent’s phone on Saturday night looks like a warzone, red dots everywhere like sniper traces. He usually doesn’t leave it off all day, but in the brief window of his time when he’s home in Las Vegas and not obliged to be anywhere or do anything it had seemed like a good idea. It's still soon enough after the funeral that he thinks he might even be justified. Some lingering religious impulse on his part after his trip home, maybe. Either way, it’s a disaster, like all his snap decisions are.

He calls the GM first because his is the first number at the top of the missed calls list, and technically Kent’s boss.

“We can fix this,” Jim says, placating and calm. Kent hangs up on him.

 -

What happens is this: In late August Kent goes home for his brother’s funeral, and when they’re standing at the graveside, listening to his father say the prayers with a little rip in the collar of his shirt, carefully placed and just as carefully torn, Kent wonders why, when he should be feeling something, anything, all he can feel is the sensation of the dirt in his hands and the dull ache of realising that his brother had no children to recite for him. Small family, the Parsons. Not very close. Ironically named.

What does Kent Parson have to leave behind, really? A cat. A trophy. The tiny hesitation of his father’s hand on his shoulder, the concern in his eyes as Kent forces a smile. The lack of tears, the lack of words because there’s nothing to be said.

The merciful lack of cameras as Kent stays for the first day of the shiva and then has to go back to Las Vegas to get ready for camp.

It’s nothing out of the ordinary, really. It’s just his life, and there’s nothing wrong with it. People die. Families get distant with the distance. There’s a war going on somewhere, and Kent plays hockey for money and posts pictures of his cat on Instagram

-

Once upon a time, there was a prince. It wasn’t Kent. It was someone a little older, a little more complicated, a little easier to love. Kent did love him, in the way boys who’ve left home too young attach themselves to each other. It was nothing like having a brother; Jack was anything but fraternal. He was an only child, for one thing, but he was the body next to Kent on the ice, next to him on the locker room, across the hall from him in the Marchand’s house where they were both welcome strangers. He was the first body Kent touched that wasn’t his own, the first person, whole and entire, who made him laugh so deeply it felt like he was lighting up inside every time it happened.

He was the first cold face Kent ever saw blue-lipped on the bathroom floor and the first person for whom he waited up all night in a hospital waiting room.

Kent had an older brother once, who he never got along with, and never defended when Jack wondered what it might be like to have a sibling, except to say “well, he’s getting shot at so we don’t have to.” What Kent meant was that he didn’t understand him, or his motives, even though Kent thinks he might, now. People are easier to understand from a distance.

He hasn’t thought about Jack this much for years, he doesn’t think. Not since Jack signed with the Falconers and every atom in Kent’s body was furious that he’d throw away the chance to have that electric crackle of chemistry on the ice again. He had been furious for two years, and then he had seen Jack jubilant in victory and the rage had faded. He knows the feeling, and what in Kent was an ache of missing pieces seemed in Jack to be freedom. Pride at having done something on his own, maybe. Kent never understood that, the driving, crippling urge to cut away his shadow, when Kent would quite happily have stayed under Jack’s like a blanket, but he doesn’t think he can be angry anymore. It’s too tiring.

Kent looks at all the missed calls on his phone and wonders if any of them are from Jack, but he can’t bring himself to scroll down to check.

Kit shoves herself up under his chin and Kent closes his eyes, feeling the drag of her fur over his stubble and can’t contemplate moving unless an earthquake shakes his house down. His phone rings. He picks it up, because avoiding it forever won’t solve the problem, but he can’t quite choke out a ‘hello.’

“Kent? Kent, it’s dad. Henrietta was trying to get ahold of you, are you okay?”

“Henrietta should know better,” Kent rasps. The last thing he wants to do is talk to his agent right now, who has no business calling his father when he’s grieving. “I... I’m really…”

He trails off. His father breathes out, slowly, the way Kent remembers from when he used to break up fights between him and Adam. “Why now?" 

Because he doesn’t think it matters anymore. Because he doesn’t want to die without anyone knowing except for Jack Zimmermann, the only person in the world who knows and doesn’t care. “I don’t-- I never told him.”

There is a long pause. Kent can imagine all the things his dad might be trying to say.  _You never told me, either. You shouldn't have told anyone_. Instead, he says: “Do you want to come home?”

Kent’s first answer is yes, but then he remembers it will be empty; his dad’s car in the driveway and Adam’s passing-out photo in his dress blues on the mantle turned face down. Kent will be one ghost among three, and if Kent sits for Seder with his dad it will be just the two of them. “Did Gretchen call?” His father’s silence says his mother either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that she’s missing a child. Kent suddenly wants to scream down the phone.

Kent’s father sighs. “You know I-- Kent, you know it doesn’t matter to me, right? I know we--”

Kent chokes, swallowing hard. “You don’t have to, okay? I’m sorry. I know I fucked up.” Kit squirms, resettling herself on his chest, and he stares at the ceiling of his bedroom, white and perfect and free of flaws.

“No, no you didn’t. I just wanted to make sure you were… are you…” he breaks off. “Shit.” Kent imagines him, large but appearing smaller, broad shoulders hunched over the table, a hand in his thick, greyed-out hair. Kent looks like him in miniature, can imagine himself in a few years time taking on the same tired set to his mouth. “Kent? Are you still there?”

Kent doesn’t know. Maybe. “Yeah.”

“Take care of yourself.”

Kent thinks it would be terrible to laugh. Trust his dad to ask him for the one thing he’s never quite been able to do. “You too. If the press gets too much--”

“We’ll handle it,” his dad says. “You and me. It’ll be okay.”

Maybe Kent hangs up too quickly, but nobody is there to witness it but Kit, whose rough tongue unerringly seeks out the saltiest spot on his neck to lick until he squirms away, skin already feeling sandpapered all over.

-

 

“Great game!”

Kent keeps as much distance as possible from the microphone in his face, but as usual it’s a losing battle. “Yeah, we were tight on defense tonight, we’re really getting a good side together this year, we got really lucky with our rookies, they’re fitting right in.” He means every word, but is braced already for the next question. It’ll be one of three: “are people treating you differently on the ice?” “Is it harder now for you to divorce your play from all this attention?” Or the ever-astounding “how has this changed your captaincy?”

“Are you ready for Providence next week? First away game of the season, and we know it’s been a tough few weeks for you.”

Kent stares blankly at the reporter, a new guy to the locker room after one of the older ones traded off, something about not being able to do his job properly around Kent. The new guy is young, and sweating in the heat of too many bodies. “It’ll be up to us to keep ourselves together, but I’m confident we’ll play our best.”

The scrum eventually dies, and then it’s just Kent and the guys getting dressed.

Marianus flops down next to him, freshly showered and shirtless in sweatpants, knocking his ankles with Kent’s. “You always look like you want to murder them. With your eyes.”

“It’s not so bad. New guy seems okay.”

Marianus -- Jakob, to his friends back home, Mary in the locker room -- sweeps a hand through his absurd fall of reddish hair and grins at him, Czech accent heavy as he says: “come, we getting beer. Three in a row!”

Kent musters a smile and heads for the shower.

-

The press skewers him.

Not all of it is negative, but there has been so much build up, so much speculation over who would be the first, so much wild mass guessing, that when Kent tweets “fuck it. I’m gay.” on a Friday morning in September it’s inevitable that the dam breaks.

There have been “I knew it all along!” articles and “what this means for the NHL” articles and a noted silence from Jack and his boyfriend, who Kent knows about through a friend of a friend of a friend.

Maybe he should have called Jack to tell him he was planning on it. Maybe he should have gone out of his way to dispel the rumours that have dogged them both since Juniors, but Kent doesn’t want to apologise and doesn’t want anyone to see him apologising and then it’s a few weeks into the season and they’re heading to Providence.

“So, what’s changed between you and Jack Zimmermann?”

“Anything going on between you and Zimmermann?”

Kent smiles at the camera. “If there’s anything going on I’m the last to know.”

There’s a laugh and Kent can escape to take his shower in peace.

 Mary soaps up next to him, not so subtly watching his back. Kent has noticed a rota of Aces taking it on in the last couple weeks; he wants to find some way to express his thanks, but Kent has only ever been good at two things. One of those is bodies, the silent, taut language of muscle and bone, and the other is hockey. All he can do is play his best, and be the best for his team, and their continued streak -- demolishing the Schooners, shutting out the Aeros and the Stars in quick succession -- has everyone on a contact high. They’re talking about playoff plans already, subtly, so as not to arouse the ire of the hockey gods, and Middle America thinks Kent Parson is its own brand-new devil.

“Parse, you okay?” Mary is squinting at him.

Kent realises he’s been standing motionless under the spray for too long, letting the hot water pound his aching shoulders. “Yeah, yeah I’m fine.”

The press skewers him and Kent hardly feels it.

He has an email from Bob and Alicia saying how sorry they are about Adam so Jack must know, but he also knows how badly Kent and Adam got along, how angry Kent was when Adam told him to give up hockey and do something useful with himself. Kent isn’t proud of the things he said to Adam in return, but he’s not quite sorry either, and that stings almost as badly.

Jack hasn’t called, and Kent thinks he’s past the point of wanting him to. There’s a saying he remembers from when he was a kid: _if not now, when_?

It never made much sense to Kent, who was constantly looking forward, but age has taught him a tiny bit of wisdom at least. He’d thought having it all on the table would make it easier, would push aside the other aches the way the agony of an ice bath chases away the pain of sore muscles, but it hasn’t. None of it’s easier, but he feels better with fewer cards clutched tightly to his chest. Ironic, for someone who lives in Las Vegas, but that’s not new.

-

They fly to Boston to play the Bruins. Kent sits next to Mary on the plane and they go to shootout with them, but scrape a win out of it. Still, by the time they’re on the bus to Providence Kent is already wiped out, and he falls asleep over three seats at the back, knees curled into his chest. The media after had been the usual thing: some decent questions about play, and then the shock-value assholes shoving mics in his face asking him if he’s ready to face Jack Zimmermann on the ice now with all the rumours about them flying around. "Come on, you can’t expect us to believe that none of it was true, I mean, since you came out _\--"_

Kent has years of practice keeping a straight face in more ways than one. "I think if you ask Jack the same question he’ll give you the same answer," Kent had said, meaning every word.

They have a night in a hotel on the edge of town, and Kent has a soda with the guys and goes to bed early. He’s rooming with Andrews, nicknamed Ando, a rookie from Edmonton whose greatest pleasure in life is finding Molson on tap and, for some reason, taking long bubble baths.

Kent makes sure, every year, that nobody stays in awe of him long. The consequence of this is that Ando hogs the bathroom and sings to himself off-key for forty minutes, but it has the benefit of making Kent smile, even though he’d really rather concentrate on the book he’s been reading --trying to read-- for months. It’s something about time-travelling Scottish people and is roughly a million pages long, making Kent thankful every day that Henrietta bought him a kindle for his birthday.

Ando eventually exits the bathroom in a cloud of steam, butt naked.

Kent raises his eyebrows, and Ando shrugs, a determined set to his mouth. “Whatever, man. It’s nothing you’ve never seen.”

Kent laughs so hard he drops his Kindle on his face. “Yeah, well, if you’ve been reading what they’re writing about me it’s nothing I’ve never blown, either.”

Ando flops face down on the other bed, wriggling until he’s under the covers but for the top of his tightly coiled hair. “‘S bullshit, dude. Who gives a fuck, you know?”

Kent does. He did, for years, until giving a fuck seemed like so much effort he was weighed down with it. Turns out leaving the closet isn’t any simpler than being in it, but at least now they’re asking all the questions he always dreaded and he’s finding it more possible to answer them than he thought it might be.

Adam would be furious, Kent thinks. It’s overshadowing his hockey, it’s reflecting badly on his family, it’s affecting his sponsorship, but Ando doesn’t care if Kent sees his dick, and that makes it easier to fall asleep, even knowing he’s going to have to see Jack tomorrow.

-

Kent slams the faceoff, flicking the puck back to Kerr and skirting left, and then it’s almost like last time they played the Falconers: scrappy on both sides, Jack only making eye contact when they’re two feet away from each other, crouched and ready for the puck to drop.

This time it doesn’t go over the clock. The Aces scrape them out 2-1, and Kent allows himself a smile for it, but it doesn’t feel nearly as good as it ought to. Once the adrenaline fades and they’re knocking gloves, he meets Jack’s eyes and hopes what’s in them isn’t hate. Jack looks away too quickly to tell, and then Kent is looking up at all six feet and six inches of Mashkov, who bumps the bottom of his fist very gently on the top of Kent’s helmet and says, in his basso rumble: “You still play good, little Parson,” before skating off to the boards.

Huh.

Kent showers off after the media circus and carefully doesn’t think about Jack in the same city, probably only a few miles away, probably speaking to his boyfriend about his defeat. 

Kent has never had someone like that in his life to turn to, except for when he was a kid and it was Jack: Jack who always took the losses harder and the wins with more critique than Kent could ever hope to muster. Now Kent is the one with the reputation for lightning-fast precision play and a strategy for every team they meet and Jack is the second-season centre revitalising a mediocre franchise game by game.

There was a big crowd tonight, and while usually Kent lives for it, the rush, the collective participation in hockey for the love of it, the reassurance that what he is and what he does isn’t inconsequential marginalia to the people who come out to see it, he’d hardly noticed.

When he gets back to their hotel he turns on his phone, always off for games, even if it’ll be buried at the bottom of his bag regardless. There’s a message from a Providence number he doesn’t recognise. His heart leaps treacherously into his throat, but the message is too distinctly garbled to be from Jack, who texts with the same precision he speaks English with.

_Kent Parson, you come have drink with us. Few guys._

_Who is this?_

_Mashkov! You not have my number? I’m sad._

Kent vaguely recollects the draft-- Mashkov went fourth, gangly and smiling -- but Kent had other things on his mind, and since they have only ever seen each other at press events they both happened to be at, and of course on the ice. Kent’s first ever goal against Jack Zimmermann instead of with him, Mashkov had hauled him furiously up out of the scrum with one hand. He doesn’t think they’d ever have spoken if the NHL weren’t a crushingly small world sometimes. 

_How did you even get mine?_

_Snowy,_ Mashkov texts back, as if Kent should know why their goalie has his number, with a series of close-bracket parentheses for punctuation. _Come for a drink, yes? Here we meet._ The pin he drops is only a few blocks away from hotel, and the map informs him it’s got some kind of generic sports bar name, like Mac’s or The Keg that Kent forgets immediately.

_Is this an ambush?_ They don’t know each other. In fact, all Kent knows about Mashkov is that he’s a serious star for the Falconers and comes from some Siberian hellhole where the water is radioactive, in a country where people like Kent are supposed to keep their mouths shut. And that he is loud when he’s cursing and can pick Kent up with one hand.

_What is ambush?_

_A trap._

Mashkov takes a long time to respond, a typing notification coming and going a few times before Kent gets the reply. _Not trap. You playing good hockey. Come have drink._

As he’s sitting on the bed, Ando already hogging the bathroom, the crushing beigeness of it all begins to close in. It’s a terrible idea. Providence is no fan of the Aces, and Kent isn’t exactly walking around invisible. It could go a lot of ways, but he has to be back by eleven regardless, so he just texts Mashkov a terse _ok_ and puts his jacket back on. If he goes missing someone will probably notice.

-

The bar isn’t loud on a Thursday night but it’s a little darker and closer than Kent likes, booths arranged around the walls for privacy with screens dotted here and there playing eight different sports.

Kent spots Mashkov by his booming laugh, his head thrown back over the red leather of the bench seat he barely fits on, his right arm thrown around the Falconers’ goalie, Aidan Snow, who is quietly rolling his eyes. There is a woman Kent doesn’t recognise right away; he thinks about turning around and leaving when Mashkov spots him and waves him over. The woman makes room for him, a tall brunette with beautiful wavy hair and a killer smile. He takes the place, feeling as though he’s in the twilight zone.

“Good time,” Mashkov says, “Snowy is being mean, say he have to leave, take beautiful Erica home and abandon us.”

“Um. Hi,” Kent offers. “Should I get a round?”

“Nah, we’re heading out,” Erica says, “glad you came to keep this one company though. He’s always a clinger after a loss.”

Her smile seems to take the sting out of it, even though Mashkov frowns dramatically. “Hey! You're not scaring Parson. I'm ask him out to make up.”

Snowy pats Mashkov on the shoulder as he passes. “Good game, okay? We’ll get you next time.”

The departures are too immediate for Kent to feel like it was anything but choreographed. His hackles come up against his will, and he wishes he was in bed right now, stretching out his tight left knee and listening to Anderson sing off-key.

There’s a moment of silence between them before Mashkov hands him an open beer. “I get more, don’t worry.”

“Uh, I think I’m actually gonna--”

“You did big thing,” Mashkov says, leaning forward on his elbows, blue shirt stretching over the breadth of his shoulders. “But you are looking tired.” He points one long finger at Kent’s chest, speaking more quietly than Kent thinks is normal for him. “I call you a rat last time, and I mean it. Dirty hockey, very bad play. Maybe you're injure my friend. But I'm see you since news and you playing better, maybe even best. I’m thinking maybe Parson trying to prove something, being careful when he come to Providence.”

Kent bristles, ready to just go, but there’s a damnable competitive edge in him that won’t back down, even from something as petty as a conversation he doesn’t particularly want to have with someone he doesn’t really know. “Hey, what happens on the ice--”

“You're brave,” Mashkov says, low and intent. “Maybe not happy, but I’m think you doing good thing. If you play hockey like this because you--” he waggles his fingers, some positive approximation of a this-or-that movement-- “I’m saying I play with you like any other guy. Maybe you think coming to Providence will be bad for you because of what reporters are saying, but me and others, we don’t care.”

Kent sees the pile of shredded beer label before he realises it’s him that’s been shredding it, gunge under his nails trapped as he scrapes the last bit off the bottle with his thumb. “No hard feelings, huh?”

“No hard feelings.” Mashkov knocks his knees against Kent’s, then flags down a waiter and orders more beer.

Kent takes a drink from the slightly flat one Mashkov had given up, finding it very near to full and still cold enough. Maybe it’s a Russian thing. Two more beers arrive and Mashkov seems happy to sit in silence, somehow managing to make it less awkward than Kent would ever have imagined.

“Thanks,” he says, when he’s not sure how much longer he can stand to watch basketball. “It’s been--”

“At home, is very dangerous for people,” Mashkov tells him, mouth a flat line. “I think here is better, but not so much better.”

“Could be worse,” Kent mutters.

Mashkov smiles at him, a tight, terse thing at odds with his expansive arms and warm, open face. “Is something Russians say also.”

Maybe it’s because he’s exhausted, or maybe it’s because Mashkov isn’t familiar to him and it doesn’t matter if he walks on eggshells around him, but Kent finds himself relaxing. By ten thirty he’s managed to nurse his way through a beer and a half and Mashkov has migrated around the booth so they’re side to side, watching a football re-run on one of the screens. It’s calming, being with someone who doesn’t seem to expect him to talk. Maybe that’s why he does. “My brother died,” he blurts, when the Patriots break for a time out.

Mashkov’s arm lands around his shoulders, heavy and warm. “Sorry. Very bad news.”

“I feel like I should be sadder.”

“Maybe is not the right time for feeling sad,” Mashkov says. Kent leans forward and lets his head drop onto the table, uncaring at its stickiness. Mashkov’s hand, after a second, rests huge and warm on his spine, and then he’s getting up. “Come on. I drive you back to the hotel. Maybe start rumour, yes?”

Kent laughs, despite himself. “Yeah. Take the heat off Zimms for a change.”

Mashkov says nothing to that, just waits for Kent to shrug into his coat, keys dangling from between his fingers.


	2. Chapter 2

Kent gets rammed sideways into the boards so hard the bridge of his helmet cuts back and bruises his temple. It takes him a fraction of a second to recover, but by then Kings’ third line have taken the puck to the net and scored top shelf, and the Aces are skating away from their first home defeat all season. 

Kent feels it in his bones, but in a way the pain of the loss is welcome; it’s better than the look of aggressive hatred from the big D-man who cornered him, even if he didn’t say anything. Kent can always tell when it’s personal.

“We’ll get them next time,” Mary mutters, skating up to hook an elbow carefully around Kent’s neck. “Head okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” Kent knows better than to lie about a possible concussion, but he’s going to get checked out and go home and that’ll be the end of it.

They line up to bump gloves and then the postmortem happens in a haze that has nothing to do with the throbbing in his temple. Kent is sure his answers are flat, but he does at least try to be professional. The problem is the adrenaline comedown, the angry, restless coil of defeat that likes to jab him from the inside every time this happens. It’s what makes him a great hockey player, but what makes him a good captain is knowing that it’s not just happening to him. He reassures the younger guys when the reporters are gone and then makes plans to watch tape later with the coaches and all the while he’s thinking about being at home with his cat.

When the medical guys clear him to leave, Kent smiles at them and drives home, but at the last minute, when he reaches the end of his cul de sac, he turns around and keeps driving.

There’s something a little magical about Las Vegas in the dark, even if it’s taken him eight years to see it. It’s less the landscape --a flat brown sweep of one-story houses spreading out in a geometric spread of rectangles-- and more the sensation of space, the endless room of a city dropped in the middle of a desert with only water and distant mountains to limit its growth. He doesn’t feel himself aware of the desert most of the time, with the artificial green in abundance in his quiet neighbourhood, but as he drives out out out towards the city limits it’s impossible not to see the vastness of the Mojave spreading out away from the road and feel as though he’s become smaller in comparison, shrinking in inverse proportion.

It makes him feel better to know how improbable Las Vegas really is, how bright a spot it is in a huge darkness. Regardless of how it came to be, and he only knows bits and pieces of the history of it, he still can’t help romanticising it to himself, pulling over on the side of the highway an hour and a half out of town past his bedtime, when the road is beginning to gradually sweep uphill. He sits himself on the hot hood of his car and leans back on the windshield, ignoring the evening bugs who’ve met a sticky end on it. From a distance Las Vegas doesn’t look so bad: the jagged toothline of the strip cutting a diagonal through it off-centre, then the places he lives and the places he goes. The arena, the strip malls and the gated developments and the millions of people sinning and laughing within it.

“Snap out of it,” he laughs to himself. “You could still be in Utica.”

It’s something Adam used to say whenever Kent complained about anything in the Q.

It doesn’t work any better now out of his mouth than it did Adam’s, but Kent is sprawled laughing on the hood of his car in December wearing a t-shirt and some ripped jeans, squinting at Pollock splatter of stars above a city he was never supposed to be drafted to and for once it doesn’t feel like he’s living somebody else’s life.

-

_Bad luck. Beat them in two weeks, return favour._

The text from Mashkov is waiting for him when he gets out of the shower, and Kent reads it with one eye while he assembles the makings of a hopefully-not-disgusting protein smoothie. _They’re going down,_ he taps out, loading spinach into his blender. Kent had to quit drinking coffee when he realised it was starting to make his hands shake in the mornings, and he has yet to find a replacement that gives him the same kick of instant awareness, so it takes him at least one pulse of the blender’s fast cycle to actually read who the text is from. _Aren’t you in Florida? Why are you texting me?_

_I’m not allowed? Will stop._

Kent chokes down a mouthful of badly disguised protein powder that only tastes vaguely like fruits and vegetables despite his best efforts, to give himself time to think about a response. _Good luck tonight,_ he sends, before he can overthink it.

_We crush Panthers, you watch._

_Your confidence is inspiring._

_Sarcasm is not nice._

Kent sends him a laughing emoji and heads to practice. He’s still almost an hour early, but he got more sleep than he was expecting last night so overall he doesn’t feel too bad about it.

He’s taking his time taping up when the rest of the team starts to trickle in. Ando is one of the earliest as usual, rookie nerves not faded enough to let him scrape in just before ice time, so he comes right over to Kent and stares at him. Then he takes his phone out and snaps a picture.

“What?” Kent asks, startled by the look on his face as much as the camera. Ando looks suspiciously shifty, as though he might be playing a prank. Kid’s got no poker face.

“Dude,” Ando says, grimacing. “Did you kill and eat the Grinch?”

“What--”

Ando licks his thumb and scrubs it all over Kent’s mouth like he’s been dying to do it for a decade. It comes away very, very green. Kent hesitates for just a split second before he launches himself at Ando, reaching for the phone he’s holding aloft in his other hand. “Don’t you dare, Andrews! I’ll--”

“Ooh! Captain’s mad,” Mary crows, showing up just in time to see Kent making an ass of himself as usual, along with his cronies Pulnikov and Kasinsky. They carpool. Kent thinks they might have just moved into each other’s houses at some point and not noticed. Now though, he has much bigger problems than wild speculation over the Eastern Europeans’ living arrangements.

Ando’s thumb hovers over the screen of his phone, otherwise flat on his back and keeping Kent at bay with his extra-long thighs. “I’m sorry, K. It’s for posterity.”

Kent thinks seriously about throttling him.

A piercing whistle breaks the mood of imminent murder and Ando takes the opportunity to wriggle away like the rookie worm he is.

Coach Grieger takes his fingers out of his mouth as Kent rolls back to his feet, already skated up and not nearly fast enough to get off the floor. “Am I gonna be fining people already?” Grieger asks. Rhetorically, in all likelihood, but Kent doesn’t want to take his chances. “It’s not even halfway through the season. Parson, what happened to your face?”

Everyone bursts out laughing.

Skoller slaps him on the shoulder. “In Sweden our gays have much better hygiene.”

There’s a moment of pin-drop silence as everyone waits for Kent to react. Mary saves him by throwing a spare jock at Skoller’s bearded head. “That explains why you stink so bad, Skoll!”

Even Grieger cracks a smile. “On the ice in five, come on. Kent, do you need a wet wipe or something?”

“It was protein!” Kent hisses, scrubbing at his chin with the back of his hand.

“Good, you’re already starting to drop weight. Have you seen the nutritionists? Okay.”

Kent reflects, finally making it over to the sink to wash his face, that maybe it’s time he started looking himself in the eye again. He doesn’t even look so bad. A little bloodshot around the blue, maybe. That might be the first hint of crow's feet. He tries a smile on instead of a smirk. It looks okay.

-

Mashkov texts him a screenshot of the Instagram photo Ando posted with a whole string of hysterical laughing emojis, as though Kent hasn’t already seen himself looking like he’s been slimed like that thing from Ghostbusters had a personal vendetta against him. They’d skated suicides until everyone looked nearly as green though, and in a few days they’ve got the Hawks, then after that the Flyers, so Kent is already doubling down on strategy hours and is making plans for each of them. After that Providence will be on their West Coast roadie and Vegas is their last stop.

It’s too soon to tell, but it’s escaped nobody’s notice that the Aces are on fire this year.

It’s mid December already though and Kent is dreading the same thing he dreads every year around this time. He’s avoided thinking about it, but then his dad texts him a picture of the old menorah in the window and Kent lets out an audible groan. He forgot to call again, but the only person who’s there to hear his remorse is Kit, who hooks a gentle claw into the threadbare fabric of his t-shirt as a warning and goes back to sleep on his stomach.

He hovers his thumb over the call icon for a little while before he presses it. “Sorry, I just--”

“The season, I know. How long is your break this year?”

“Three days.”

“Want me to come out?”

Kent’s first instinct is to say yes, to say to hell with it, yes, come out and spend three days with me in the sun and get out of the damn house, filled with pictures of something that doesn’t exist anymore. Then he remembers something about an email he looked at and made a pact to reply to, then forgot about. “You’re going to Florida.”

“Plans can always change, Kent.” His dad says it kindly, as though he’s asking Kent to made a demand on him. As though he expects it.

“No, I-- I’ll just go over tape, maybe go to the gym. Sleep in. It won’t be-- have fun. Let me know how it goes. I don’t think uncle Jim really wants to see me anyway. I know he’s been a little…”

“Screw him,” his dad says. “If you want me to come, I’ll come.”

“Go to Florida,” Kent says, managing to keep his voice level. “Happy Hanukkah.”

“Still don’t have one, huh?”

“We’ve been over this, it’s for kids.”

“Yeah, well you’re my kid. Indulge me.”

They both pause at the same time, as though the reminder of Adam’s death has blindsided them exactly in concert. Kent marvels that he can feel this bad about someone he never quite managed to like, but the terrible truth of it is that Adam was his older brother, if never his idol or his protector. Kent didn’t have to like him to love him, and damned if that isn’t something he never wants to look too closely at. Kent runs a hand over Kit’s smooth fur, fingers deep in the soft down under the first layer. The softness distracts him, her purring settling his roiling stomach. “I’ll be okay. I’m a big boy, I know how to order my own takeout.”

His dad chuckles obligingly. “Hey, I wanted to ask you about something. You know I don’t read-- anyway. You know you can talk to me, right? I know we haven’t always… If it’s because you have someone and you don’t want me to--”

“No!” He almost sits bolt upright, but Kit digs her claws in and cracks an eye open to glare at him. “No, there’s nothing like that going on.”

His dad clears his throat. “Are people giving you a hard time?”

Kent thinks about the calls and the requests from You Can Play who he’s got something lined up with, and the myriad sponsorships he hasn’t lost. Compared to the three he has, it’s weighted heavily towards, if not ecstatic support, then at least grudging acceptance. Then he thinks of rooms going silent when he enters, and of the strangest feeling of malice that plagues him sometimes when he is somewhere without a team-mate watching his back. It’s probably paranoia. “Well, I’m the best player in the league.” He musters a smirk, even though his dad can’t see him. “People are always giving me a hard time.”

“Love you.”

 “You too.” Kent hangs up, drapes his arm over his eyes and tosses his phone out of reach.

-

 Mashkov texts him a picture of a slot machine. _Stupid to have in airport. What people are doing???? Arriving in Las Vegas and thinking yes will stay here then get right back on plane, go home again?_  

 _We’re going to wipe the floor with you tonight,_ Kent informs him, pausing his morning ritual to smile at his phone.

_Maybe you not score goal with your ass this time, then we talk._

_My ass is magnificent._

There’s a few seconds of Mashkov typing without a text forthcoming. Kent puts it down and goes to check his setup for napping, then picks it up again in weird, tense frustration. _Is true,_ reads the message. _Internet says so._

Kent shakes himself out of the stupor it seems to induce in him and shoves his phone away in his back pocket.

It’s been like this for two years: no matter how hard he tries and how well he thinks he’s let it go, he always gets the jitters before he faces off with Jack on the ice. 

It’s not nerves. Kent thinks it’s a holdover from being eighteen and knowing that going out there together was a little bit of magic, a tiny kernel of something special. Kent loves hockey more than he’s ever loved anything else, but hockey isn’t a person. Hockey isn’t somebody who made his play better, who made him feel like he was travelling at the speed of sound, who made him weightless for an hour and a half just by being next to him.

He isn’t angry anymore, but his body remembers it the way it remembers every injury he’s ever had. Healed but waiting, a promise for the future. One day he’s going to step out on the ice with Jack and it won’t feel wrong to see him across the dot.

It hasn’t happened yet though.

A post-it note on the fridge in his handwriting says “take a damn nap” so that’s exactly what he does, and it turns out to be dreamless.

When he wakes up he’s timed his alarm just right to make it to the dome. When he’s driving though, he doesn’t find himself thinking of Jack. He isn’t avoiding it. He’s just remembering the bump of a huge fist gently impacting the top of his head, and an unexpected overture.

Support. He’s going to wreck the Falconers tonight, but he thinks Mashkov will forgive him after.

-

They wreck the Falconers, but they have to fight for it.

As usual Jack makes eye contact on the faceoff and Kent has never been so aware that he’s playing center, stick to stick with him. It still kind of feels like the first time, but tonight they have the home advantage, and after bringing home a Stanley Cup even the Vegas crowd is loyal. 

Kent wins the faceoff. And the next one. This time he’s keeping it as clean as he can, staying low and tight to the ice, making it his mission to live up to his reputation as the fastest in the league.

He whips past Mashkov in the second with a hair’s breadth of distance, and Kent hears him cursing over the rush of blood in his ears. The crowd is on their feet before the goal is even confirmed, but Kent knows it’s good. He put it there.

They finish out regulation 1-0.

There hasn’t been a single dirty hit or high stick since the first drop, and when they line up at the end Kent is beaming. He can’t help himself. It feels good to win, but it feels better to win well, to know that skill came out on top. Even Mashkov’s glower abates somewhat when Kent can’t help but grin at him and mouth “I warned you” all the way up at him.

“I’m not believing you,” Mashkov mutters, thumping the bottom of his fist very gently on top of Kent’s head again.

Jack is stone faced, but Kent just looks away. He’s making it a mission to pick better battles.

When he’s through with press he finally turns his phone back on. Before reading his slew of incoming messages he pulls his lip between his teeth, chest aching with held breath. The last thing he wants is to ruin his mood, but Mashkov took him out in Providence when he didn’t have to. Kent likes to think maybe the feeling he’s not doing too well identifying is just him returning the favour. _I owe you a beer,_ he offers, dropping a pin for a bar he knows on the city limit, near enough to the strip to be not deserted but low-key enough to be a good place to unwind. He’s always glad nobody in Vegas really cares about hockey, but he’s still cautious enough to choose wisely where he gets his fixes.

It isn’t a pick-up spot but it’s close to one, a bar just over the line Kent remembers discovering by accident when he was a rookie who couldn’t sleep for the nerves crackling under his skin and the conviction that this would all drop out from under him at any minute; he used to drive around at night with sunglasses on, seeking the false daylight of the neon. It’s nothing special, but they’ve never ID’d him and nobody has ever complained when he puts Katy Perry on the dumb jukebox. Maybe he’ll head there after, finish off the night with an incautious fuck with a willing stranger. Now that he’s out, it wouldn’t even be a scandal.

_Owe me many beers, we keep score. I bring friends?_

Kent’s feeling magnanimous. Maybe that’s it: the sensation of lift, of readiness.  _Sure,_ he thinks. Why not. Snow’s not so bad.

-

Mashkov shows up with Aiden Snow, as expected. He also shows up with Jack.

Kent has a table already, having declined an invite from Mary and the Iron Curtain to go back to their neighbourhood and get quietly wine-drunk on the couch in one of their identical duplex houses and one from Ando and the other rookies to go to a wing joint that serves by the pound.

Nobody really gives him shit about it; everyone knows when it’s the Falconers it’s personal, even if they don’t know the exact details. Hell, Kent doesn’t either, and he’s the one who’s been fucked up over Jack Zimmermann for the better part of his adult-ish life by now. 

Jack looks like he’d rather be facing a firing squad than be here, but Mashkov has one yard-long arm around his shoulders and is gesticulating expansively with the other, saying something about pies, of all things.

Jack catches sight of Kent and ducks out from under Mashkov’s elbow, shoulders stiff even from the distance of the doorway.

Mashkov seems to be willing to ignore Jack’s escape in favour of coming over to Kent, if not beaming, then at least looking far less hostile than Kent himself looks after being beaten. “Parson! You’re not buying beer yet?”

“I don’t make a habit of drinking alone,” he says, before he can catch himself, and damn his stupid, stupid mouth, because Jack is right there and his face, if possible, tightens even further.

Snow does that weird thing goalies do and leans right into Kent’s space. From up close he looks a little like he’s wearing eyeliner, even if Kent objectively can tell it’s just the result of very pale blue eyes and very dark eyelashes. “Does Las Vegas do beer that hasn’t already been pissed out by drunk old people? If it’s American I’m leaving.”

“Laugh it up when you see your tax returns, Rhode Island,” Kent snaps back. “I’m getting Bud just to spite you.”

Snow laughs. “It’s a better burn if you just do it.”

“Where’s your girlfriend? She’s much nicer than you are.”

Mashkov herds everyone into the booth, arranging it so he’s sitting next to Kent and facing Jack and Snow. A waiter shows up and takes beer orders, and then they’re sitting in hideous silence for a second too long before Mashkov elbows Kent in the ribs and leans forward with a look of intense concentration towards his team-mates. “So how we are killing him?”

“Westboro Baptist Church has go you covered,” Kent mutters, aware that he’s smirking but not willing to try not to.

“Don’t say that,” Jack says, breaking his stony silence. “Ken-- Kent, come on, don’t.”

“Why?” Kent still isn’t angry, but the good mood is slowly deflating. He’s just tired, tired, tired. Tired of trying so hard not to fuck up every time he comes near Jack fucking Zimmermann, who invited himself to this and now is acting like he’s here at gunpoint. “Why shouldn’t I say it? It’s not like anyone else is falling over themselves to come out, so I can say anything I want. I know you’d rather I didn’t, but I don’t actually give a damn what you want anymore, okay? I’m sorry if shit rolled downhill on you, but I’ve never said a word about--”

“I think maybe we are leaving,” Mashkov rumbles, his whole face scrunched together somehow. “Sorry, I--”

“No, stay,” Kent says. “I’ll be good.”

Jack snorts.

Snow and Mashkov exchange a look across the table and get up at the same time. Maskhov uses Kent’s shoulder as leverage, leaving his hand where it is for long enough for the warmth of his palm to seep through Kent’s t-shirt and into his shoulder. Kent has the weirdest urge to cover his hand with his own, so he just does it. Fuck it. He lets go quick, and then Mashkov is disengaging, disappearing out the door with Snow, a full head taller and wider by an eight-inch margin, and Kent makes a point of watching him go before he turns back to Jack. “Say it. Tell me how mad you are that I did the thing you’re too afraid to do. Get it off your chest.”

“I’m sorry about Adam,” Jack says instead, and Kent has the weirdest urge to pour beer all over him. “I should have called. I just didn’t… I didn’t want that to be the only reason I--”

“Thanks,” Kent snaps, despite his resolution to be calm. “You can stop now.” Jack just seems to bring it out in him, this hideous urge to jab just to get a response, any response. The ache’s been fading, but hearing Jack say Adam’s name, talking as though all Kent deserves is a too-late condolence for someone Jack met _once,_ it’s too much to hold in all of a sudden. 

Kent is under no illusions that what he does and what he is is important. He knows too much about himself, remembers with perfect, neon-crisp clarity the sneaking around he’s done since the draft, the quick blowjobs in hotels he’s booked for the night and checked out of after two hours; he knows too much about how preposterous it is for anyone to look up to him as any kind of role model, as any kind of responsible, shit-together person. He knows that in a lot of ways Adam was right about him, that just being talented isn’t enough to make a life, but for what it was worth it was all he’d ever really lived for, until Jack showed up in Juniors and Kent discovered what it meant to feel important, to feel necessary, to feel part of something bigger. Kent’s a team player and always has been, would go to the wall for his guys, but in Quebec they were children far from home and Jack was the only one who matched him, who _knew_ him, who listened when Kent shrugged and confessed into the side of his neck that he thought for sure his family wouldn’t accept him if they knew, but hey, whatever, they were going to go to the NHL and win the Stanley Cup and they were going to get there together. Jack was the first person he told, the first person who kissed him back without immediately looking at him, panicked, and reasserting the mutually assured destruction of a dirty secret.

Jack never told him how bad it was for him, and Kent will never stop blaming himself for not seeing it, for not being able to look past his own joy and see how little of it Jack felt, but finally Kent thinks it might not have been entirely his fault that Jack cut him off at the knees. “Why did you even come?” Kent asks him, finally managing to make eye contact with him somewhere they aren’t separated by padding. Neither of them is wearing gloves. “You hate bars. You hate me. I don’t get it. Just because Mashkov--”

“Tater likes you,” Jack says, monotone and glaring. “I thought maybe you’d… never mind. It was clearly a mistake. I just wanted to say… I don’t know, actually. I never know what to say to you.”

“Well that makes two of us.” Kent chugs his warming beer, just to have something to do with his mouth that isn’t yell. He can just see the articles in the morning: Parson and Zimmermann Replay Face-Off, Get Ejected From Bar. “I wanted you to call. I’ve always wanted you to call. You just have to actually tell me what _you_ want. You never-- How hard would it have been for you to just come out and--” 

“You know why I don’t want to do that.”

“That’s not what I meant!” Kent’s beer is finished. He forces himself not to reach for Mashkov’s abandoned Yuengling, instead pressing his hands flat to the table, breathing through his nose like his personal always reminds him to. Oxygenate. Calm down.

“I wanted you to never have-- to never have been so good,” Jack says, almost too quiet for him to hear. “To have just… just left it at hockey. I loved playing with you. I-- we both knew it wasn’t going to last, Kent. We _knew._ ”

“I didn’t.” Kent drags his car keys out of his pocket and drops them on the table, clatter loud between them. “I didn’t have a sure spot anywhere I wanted no matter what I did, I didn’t have a place to hide if I needed it, I didn’t have parents who went to charity balls and lived somewhere out of a magazine. I just had hockey, and you. I didn’t know if I could have even gone back to Utica if I’d told my dad.”

Jack glares at him, all long nose and impossibly sharp blue eyes, his clenched jaw still a little twisted from the bad hit he took once, mouth crooked on one side, even with his lips pressed tight together. “We were kids.”

“Yeah,” Kent says, getting up. “But we’re not anymore, and I’m tired of--”

“Of what, what did I--”

“I’m tired of wanting you!” Kent clenches his keys into his fist so hard he thinks he’ll have the marks of the teeth in his palm for hours, trying so hard to be quite, just in case anyone in the room is watching, or has a camera out to grab this for a cheap thrill on the internet. “Go home to your-- No, don’t look at me like that, I’m not going to say it, you know I won’t say it, give me some credit. I’m just-- fuck it, I’m tired of this being all I can ever think about when you’re in the room. I avoided the All-Star last year because I don’t want to know what it would be like to play with you again. I’m tired. I’m tired of you looking at me like I’m some bomb that’s gonna go off and ruin your life.”

Jack looks up at him and the room falls away. If Kent could go back in time knowing what he knows now, he might be tempted to drag his fingers along the edge of Jack’s jaw, feel the thick evening stubble Jack has always hated rasping against his knuckles, might be tempted to press fingertips under his chin and tilt him up for a kiss, but instead Kent just looks down at him and waits for the blow.

“I don’t want your spotlight. I just want to play hockey. I don’t want anyone banging down my door asking me if I’ll pose for Out magazine and what I think about politics. I don’t want it to be the only thing people talk about. Don’t you get that? Or do you just...”

If Kent thought he’d be able to get a laugh past the lump in his throat he might try it. Instead he says: “You know, I never wanted yours either. I never wanted to go first. Not like that.”

“I keep waiting for you to show up somewhere telling people what it was like in the Q,” Jack says, unblinking, as though what he’s saying isn’t designed specifically to land in Kent’s guts and shred them.

“Then you don’t know me at all,” Kent manages, before he leaves too much money on the table for the beer and leaves.


	3. Chapter 3

Alexei Mashkov is leaning against the bumper of some guy’s yellow hummer when Kent forces himself out the door. Kent stops short about two feet away from him, blinking furiously to make sure he’s not going to have a meltdown in a parking lot at nine thirty at night. That would really be embarrassing.

“This your car?” Mashkov asks, hooking a thumb at the canary monstrosity he’s made his temporary home.

“What? No!”

“Can’t blame me for thinking maybe, yes?”

“It’s-- I drive a--” He gestures wildly at his car, a sleek, black Alfa Romeo that’s just flashy enough to make him laugh. Currently it’s dusty as hell and still vaguely has the print of his ass on the hood from the other night if he squints. “That.”

“Ah, well. You’re small enough.” Mashkov smiles, taking the sting out. “Snowy takes cab back to hotel, but I’m thinking is my fault you’re not having good time. Maybe I’m say sorry, but don’t want to interrupt.”

Kent is about to burst into angry tears. Now is really not the time to be feeling this blindsided by the prickling warmth Mashkov is provoking in him, an itch under his skin that says: _Ask._ It’s the ugliest part of Kent, he knows, the part that reads people on the ice and off. He tries not to notice, not to pay attention, because if he’s learned anything from Jack it’s that hockey players are dangerous, and that fucking around with them only ever ends badly for him. He doesn’t want Mashkov’s kind brown eyes or his damn sympathy or the crystalline memory of him being the only person who told him that it was okay to have complicated feelings about his brother and that it was okay for Kent to have reacted by blowing his cover wide open. That was when Mashkov didn’t even know him. And now what? They text. It’s not enough for Kent to have this overfull feeling, as though his emotions are trying to escape him by any means necessary and he might end up a messy smear on the cracked asphalt if he stands still any longer.

“I need to eat,” Kent says. “I’m dropping weight already and if I don’t stick to the plan--”

“Okay, we get food,” Mashkov says, pushing himself off the Hummer and crossing the distance in about three stops. God, he really is huge. Kent should tell him no. Kent should be an adult about it. Kent shouldn’t want him to just put his huge hand on his back again, where he’s tight between the shoulders, and leave it there for a while.

“Okay,” Kent echoes, horrified at the thickness of his voice.

Mashkov folds himself into Kent’s car with a token grimace and put the seat all the way back without another word.

They go to the PF Chang’s in Summerlin because Kent has never once been recognised there. Everyone at this end of town is either rich enough not to care about other rich people or has better things to do than harass an NHL player or two. Mashkov follows him in and doesn’t say a word as they’re shown to a table in an alcove. “Listen,” Kent starts, “I don’t have anything against--”

“He say he wanting to come,” Mashkov says, looking vaguely wounded. “I didn’t know there so much bad feelings.”

Kent doesn’t want to talk about it, but somehow the smell of food and the silent car ride have shoved him back into some semblance of order, and he feels less like he’s about to shake apart at the seams. Maybe he’s in the twilight zone, but Mashkov is calming purely by dint of his being right _there_ and not needing to say anything or seeming to need Kent to say anything. Kent has never really had much experience with comfortable silence. It’s weird. He’s not sure he likes it. “It’s ancient history,” he says, scanning the menu without seeing it. He always gets the same thing, anyway. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Kent is starting to edge into defensive, but Mashkov just shrugs his huge shoulders and stretches out his legs under the table, knees bumping Kent’s as though by accident. Maybe that’s why Kent keeps talking, despite himself. “I didn’t-- do people really think I came out for the publicity?”

“Is that what Zimmboni say?”

“Not-- not exactly, no.” Kent moves his knees. “Never mind.”

“No, I think you did it for private reason.” Mashkov says. “I don’t live your life.” He pauses, hands in the air like he’s about to try to explain with shadow puppets, clearly searching for the words. “I’m sorry. I get too friendly sometimes, not thinking of maybe is better for you just you and me. Forgetting that you’re not--” he makes some kind of weird circular motion which illuminates precisely nothing. “Anyway. Sorry. I’m buying you dinner, make up for it.”

Kent should remind him he probably has a hotel curfew, and that Kent will happily drive him back but can’t make it late tonight because he has to go home and feed the cat. Kent should say something neutral and disinterested and just let it peter out into awkwardness and delete Mashkov’s number. He shouldn’t be thinking about inviting him home just to see, just to convince himself that if he gets rejected tonight it’s not the end of the world. “I never thanked you for taking me out in Providence, so I guess we’re even.”

“I’m not looking for thanks,” Mashkov says, frowning again.

Kent is about to say something when the waiter arrives. Kent orders his usual and Mashkov orders something vegetarian Kent doesn’t comment on. They pass into silence for a while, but again it fails to be awkward. The food is good, but Kent is suddenly ravenous even though he ate after press and had a protein bar in the car earlier. There’s no rhyme or reason to it; some days it’s all he can do to keep eating the amount he should and others it’s like he could eat double the calories and never quite be full. 

Mashkov watches him, eating more slowly, until he catches Kent fortuitously without a mouthful he might choke on and asks: “What you are doing for Christmas?”

Kent pauses with his fork (chopsticks have always defeated him) halfway to his mouth, thankful he hasn’t just spat food everywhere. “Oh, uh, I'm Jewish. I don’t celebrate it. It’s not-- I’d go home to see my dad on the break but since-- since Adam died my uncle has gotten back in touch and I think he’s going to go to Florida and I just--”

Mashkov pokes him, very very gently, in the shoulder. “Can just say you don’t want to go.”

“Yeah.” Kent kind of wants him to leave his finger there, like an arrowhead, pinning him inside his skin. “Nothing, I don’t want to go.”

“Christmas here not really Christmas anyway. Russian Christmas is sixth January.” He finishes his plate and sets his chopsticks aside, leaning forward on his elbows, which does sinful things to his shirt.

“I was just going to get takeout and watch a movie.” Somehow it’s easier to talk now that Mashkov doesn’t seem to expect him to make any more confessions.

Mashkov’s entire forehead crumples into a confused frown. “Why?” he sounds as though he’s missed some vital information and resents it.

Kent forces himself not to laugh, knots in his spine loosening. “Chinese food and a movie. It’s-- I don’t even like Chinese food that much, it’s just a joke. I just really don't like Christmas.”

“We halfway there already. Having Chinese food now.” He looks down at his hands, then up at Kent through the fall of his untrimmed hair. “So I have questions for you.”

“I, uh-- what?”

“I’m not doing Christmas here. You're not doing Christmas ever. Can buy flights, am rich now. Where in America you’ve never go but you want to?”

Kent swallows a mouthful of Sichuan beef without tasting it, ease of the moment disappearing as fast as it came. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why me? I’m sure you have plenty of people in Providence who’d be glad to have you, even if it’s not Russian Christmas.”

Mashkov thinks about it for a second, looking into the distance. He raises his hands again as though his terrible charades will help him find the words. Kent has the weirdest urge to grab him by the wrists and help. He puts his fork down instead, fighting the sudden desire to stab himself in the thigh with it. That would be unhygienic, and he needs his thighs kind of a lot. For hockey.

“I’m think I don’t want to be part of someone else’s family. It’s maybe not feeling real, and makes being away different. Last year was fine but this year I’m wanting something else.” Mashkov says it like it’s not the weirdest thing Kent has ever heard, Mashkov thinking it might be better to spend three days with Kent of all people, whose stellar grief integration plan involved coming out of the closet on Twitter then failing entirely to cope with anything else.

“I’m-- I’ve got a cat,” Kent blurts out, aware that he’s being nonsensical. He has a vivid mental picture of himself somehow kicking his own ass. “I’m staying home.”

“Parson,” Mashkov says, “are we friends?”

Kent does him the credit of thinking about it, because his first instinct is to say that he’s not sure, and that’s not fair to him. They might not be close, but Kent isn’t one of those guys who’s got a whole web of intense, in-joke, ride-or-die relationships from Juniors and his rookie year. He had one that imploded spectacularly, and then he had so much to prove his first year with the Aces, as their second-choice also-ran, that he barely did anything but sleep and play. He’s never told anyone how close he came to burning out in his first season, or how relieved he was to take away some silver from the awards that year because it was all that proved to anyone that the Aces didn’t wind up with a poor substitute for Bad Bob’s son. “I think so,” Kent admits, “but I’m not the best judge.”

“Maybe you’re not the only NHL player having a secret, making it strange to go home.”

Kent stares at him, trying his hardest to identify what’s happening in his own head, whether the instantaneous rush of relief and recognition is all just some kind of trick of the mind. Trusting his judgement anywhere but on the ice has gotten him nowhere good except for out, which he refuses to feel sorry about, but still he says: “okay, well. As long as you don’t mind cat hair. I’ll see you in a couple weeks?”

Mashkov smiles at him, and it’s not his huge, victorious grin. It’s something quieter, something that kicks Kent right in the stomach, warning him with a violent clench how badly this might bite him in the ass. “I’m still pay for dinner,” Mashkov says, stealing a bite of Kent’s broccoli.

-

Kent’s still kind of furious about the Aces’ Christmas video shoot (mortifying, Kent had to dress up as a reindeer for one scene, he’s seriously considering claiming a religious exemption for next year, or at least writing some kind of clause into his contract that prevents him from having to be directly involved in Christmas shit) when he gets home and finds Mashkov in his driveway.

“I thought you weren’t coming until Thursday?” Kent says, wrong-footed and for some reason very thirsty despite the free eggnog on offer at the studio.

Mashkov stands up from Kent’s stoop, managing to look bashful. “I’m sorry. We had longer break so I book an earlier flight. Surprise?”

“Surprise is right.” Kent can’t exactly kick him out; for one thing he doesn’t want to, but for another their strange text-based… friendship? Acquaintance? Mutual understanding? Has been kind of a godsend over the last couple weeks. Kent couldn't even say for sure why that is, except for he's so used to only using his phone to take calls from his agent and to post pictures of Kit that it's a novelty to actually spend time texting one specific person. He's even discovered that Alexei hates speaking on the phone. “Is terrible,” he'd said when Kent had called to make sure he hadn't hallucinated him wanting to spend the break in Las Vegas after some kind of stroke. “Can't see you, is even harder to understand English.” Kent had pointed out that having a face to face was easy if they tuned on facetime but Alexei had huffed and said “I text,” before hanging up. The texts that followed had been mostly hilarious though, so there's that.

Anyway, Kent was expecting to have tonight to clear his house of embarrassing paraphernalia like spare jocks and an overflowing laundry hamper and trashy romance books he hasn't bought digitally yet. He has a cleaning service and a service that delivers food but he usually asks them not to move his stuff, so he's gotten used to stepping on cat toys and dropping his bag right inside the door for when he has to head right back out again.

That being said, if Alexei -- Kent has had to admit to himself that he will never be able to hear anyone call him “Tater” without waiting to be picked up and shaken like a rag doll, it's Pavlovian at this point -- is going to show up a whole 36 hours early he's going to have to deal with Kent's borderline slobbery. 

Kent shrugs and opens the door. Kit yowls as though he's been gone for weeks instead of just the day and bodyslams him in the shins.

“What is that?” Alexei crouches down to get a better look.

“My cat.”

“Is not cat, is-- some kind of bigger thing. Makes big noise, lives under bridges.”

“If you're calling my cat a troll I'm kicking you out.”

 “Would never,” Alexei amends immediately.

Kent picks up Kit, who begins to purr aggressively in Alexei's direction. Sure, she has two differently coloured eyes that make her look slightly squinty and enormous teeth her lips don't quite close over, and maybe it took a good two years for her thick, grey fur to grow back in evenly, but Kent happens to think she's cute and he's reasonably sure she thinks the same of him. It's deeply debatable which of them is in charge, and has been ever since Kent did a publicity thing at the animal shelter downtown and ended up staying for six hours trying to coax her out of her box, then into a cat carrier so he could drive her home.

“Take any bedroom,” Kent says. “All the sheets are clean, I think. It's been a while since anyone slept over, and last time it was just a rookie who drank too many Bellinis, anyway. Nothing… anyway. Um. Make yourself at home.” He knows from long experience that Kit will actively attempt to trip him over if he puts her down without feeding her immediately so he leaves Alexei to it and heads to the kitchen. “Yeah I know,” Kent says into her fur, “where does he get off calling someone else huge?”

“I hear you!” Alexei calls back from the hall.

“Good!” Kent puts Kit down on the kitchen counter and feeds her, listening to the noise upstairs.

Eventually Kent yanks something pre-made with salmon and spinach out of the freezer and throws it in the oven. It's strange to keep remembering Alexei is here, walking around upstairs. He seems in no hurry to come down but Kent doesn't mind. He's never hosted a rookie out of the belief that he might one day like to bring someone home he wouldn't want to answer questions about but he thinks maybe next year he’ll put his name in for it. It's kind of nice that the house isn't empty, but it throws into sharp relief how long it's been since he had anyone over for any reason at all. He hasn't thrown a party since his housewarming when the whole place was mostly bereft of furniture and rife for jokes about Kent's total lack of personal taste for interior décor. He can't help it that he bought a house that was mostly white inside. He likes the hardwood floors and the master bedroom has one of those ensuite bathrooms where the whole room is technically part of the shower.

He's lost in thought about tomorrow's game, as his thoughts return to hockey like clockwork when he's not otherwise occupied, when Alexei comes downstairs in what can only be described as huge fuzzy pyjamas. “I took a shower,” he says carefully. “Long flight, I'm borrow towel.”

“Sure, no problem.” Kent is staring.

“It's cold in Providence,” Alexei says with just a touch of defensiveness.

“So you dress up as a Yeti?”

“What is Yeti?”

“You know trolls but not Yetis? We're going to have to work on your cryptids.”

Alexei opens his mouth as though he’s about to say something scathing in his heavily-accented yet occasionally very quick-off-the-mark English, then makes a face like a dog scenting some kind of fascinating new aroma and makes an abrupt turn at the bottom of the stairs to cut a beeline for the kitchen. Kit is still on the counter, fastidiously licking her privates. Kent gently moves her aside and makes a halfhearted attempt at wiping the surface before he starts setting out plates and food.

It all happens more or less in silence. Kent is starting to wonder if he’s made a tiny huge mistake going along with this objectively ridiculous plan. For one thing, they don’t know each other, not really, have only been face to face a few times over the years. Before Mashkov was with the Falconers he was the best rookie defenseman in Columbus, then did a season with the Flyers, but he’s always been eastern conference and Kent has been an Ace since his first year. The year Kent won his first Stanley Cup the Bluejackets got knocked out early, so it’s not even as though Kent has seen him throughout the late drag of a playoff season. Unlike Kent, Mashkov has been a steadily improving player, getting better every year in a quiet, determined sort of way, until suddenly he’s on Falconers billboards and merchandise and starring in their YouTube spots. It’s ridiculous to think they’ll ever overlap more than they do now, when clearly the Falconers have no intention of letting him go anytime soon.

Kent shakes himself out of it because he realises he’s been staring for the better part of a minute, replaying everything he knows about the man standing in his kitchen trying to bribe his cat into liking him with salmon skin. Kit deigns to accept payment for her affections and slams her blunt head into Mashkov’s outstretched fingers. Alexei makes a delighted noise and tears off another piece of salmon.

“She’ll get fat,” Kent blurts. “Feline diabetes--”

“She already fat,” Mashkov points out, letting out a stream of faintly filthy-sounding Russian which Kit appears to tolerate, eyes fixed on the salmon. Just for that, Kent doesn’t warn him, and the whole thing ends with Kit launching herself teeth-first at Alexei’s hand and attempting to swallow his fingers along with the food. Alexei laughs, runs his hand under the tap to cool the little indents her fangs have left on his skin and picks up his plate before she can pounce on that too. He grins at Kent, eyes nearly disappearing into his cheeks. “I’m never having cats at home. My mother has allergic. Maybe I get one here.”

Okay, so Kent maybe thinks this might not be a huge disaster after all.

-

Kent always wakes up on game days buzzing, and it turns out that even when there’s someone snoring very loudly across the hall that makes very little difference. He dislodges Kit from her habitual sleeping spot sprawled over his shoulder with her extra-long whiskers tickling his ear and starts his routine by spending fifteen minutes in the shower then going downstairs to pack his bag. He’ll bum around for twenty minutes while he feeds Kit and decides what book to bring with for later when he leaves it at the rink. He can’t decide so eventually he settles on some sudoku and takes off.

He feels like maybe he should have left a note or something, but his kitchen is fairly self-explanatory and Alexei is twenty-eight years old or thereabouts and probably can manage his own breakfast.

It’s the last game before their winter break so the mood at morning skate is determined. Everyone wants to finish out on a win, even if their break is objectively not long enough to be considered a vacation. It’s really too bad that they’re playing Portland. The Pioneers don’t exactly have a reputation for clean play, but the Aces have historically had the upper hand only because collectively their first line, Kent’s line, is faster. He’s not the kind of captain who makes big speeches, but after everyone’s had the talk from the coaches and they’re gathered in the locker room to go have lunch before everyone heads home for naps Kent stands up in his skates and clears his throat. 

Mary whistles piercingly, and Kent sticks both fingers in his ears. “Come on, everyone’s got enough tinnitus from the goal horn.” They quiet down anyway, which is kind of gratifying. Kent presses on before he can psyche himself out of it. “I just wanted to say that I appreciate you guys, all of you. We’re killing it so far, and I have no doubts we’re gonna keep killing it, but that’s not what I want to talk about. You all know what you have to do on the ice. I’m never going to say that’s the easy part, because it’s pretty hard work, but I-- you’ve all been really great to me this year, and I guess I wanted to thank you.” He pauses, wondering if maybe he’s miscalculated, if he’s completely ruined the optimistic, determined mood of the locker room, but he presses on anyway. “I want us to go out there and crush them tonight because we can. I think we’re the best team in the league, and I don’t mean that just on the ice.” He waits for the traditional deluge of mockery but none is forthcoming. “I’m-- uh, I’m done now, you can talk.” Mary jumps up with a jubilant whoop and crushes Kent into a hug, which breaks the restrained atmosphere pretty effectively, and Kent ends up smothered in hundreds of pounds of sweaty hockey player, all making it their bizarro mission to ruin what’s left of his composure. “Off! Off, come on, I’m only little!”

“Oh shit, you’re right!” Ando yells, “we never noticed!” He doesn’t release the headlock, but Kent wriggles out without too much trouble.

“Okay, fuck, you’re all too hungry to think straight, let’s get food.”

“Who says we want to think straight?” Swoops mutters, a sly tilt to his mouth. “Not thinking straight’s been working okay so far.”

“Enough,” Kent manages, trying to shove his hair mostly back under a hat and failing. “Someone’s buying me steak and I don’t care who. Captain mode engaged.”

They all end up in their usual lunch spot that already knows their orders, and Kent makes it home around two having completely forgotten that he has a guest.

Mashkov is still wearing his dumb pyjamas and is sacked out over the whole length of Kent’s couch, his feet hanging off the arm-rest and one hand flopped over onto the floor. If Kent’s being honest he looks kind of completely dead, which shouldn’t be endearing at all. He doesn’t stir when Kent opens the door but at the soft slam of it hitting the frame he sits bolt upright, from asleep to awake in about 0.05 of a second. “Holy shit, sorry,” Kent whispers.

Mashkov scrubs a hand over his eyes. “‘S okay, I’m light sleeper,” he says, as though this is well-practiced. “Most noises okay, don’t like bangs.”

“I have to nap,” Kent says apologetically, feeling guilty about having disturbed him, even though this is Kent’s house and he’s on Kent’s couch. “Did Kit bother you?”

Mashkov shakes his head blearily. “No, don’t know where she is.”

Kent does: she’s curled right on his pillow, because she goes back to sleep after eating and wakes up no earlier than 1pm no matter what. “I’m-- I’m just gonna--”

“The phone rang,” Alexei says, squinting at him. “Thought I should tell you. Are you nap now?”  
Kent doesn’t tell him that he usually naps on the very couch Alexei has made his home, because that feels rude, and Kent has been known to change it up on occasion so it’s not as though Alexei is disrupting his routine. The landline only ever rings if it’s telemarketers, Henrietta trying him when his phone is off and sometimes his dad for the same reason, and two out of three of those he can call back. Kent mutters something affirmative and heads upstairs, dislodging Kit from her spot --not without a grumbled chirp of feline protest-- and tries to go back to sleep. It should be easy; he’s full and tired and has a game tonight. His body is trained into routine. He can’t quite manage to drop off right away, though, and he can’t figure out why. He came home in a great mood, but something about waking Alexei has got him wrong-footed.

He mashes his face into the pillow in an attempt to force the weird guilt out of his mind. It’s his house, after all, and Alexei isn’t even supposed to be here until tonight, but ten minutes later Kent gives it up. He stumbles downstairs in his underwear to discover that Alexei hasn’t gone back to sleep either, and is flicking through one of Kent’s mortifying novels. It’s one with some kind of purple cover with a heroine standing on a windswept cliff looking out to sea. Kent thinks it’s the one where her lover is lost at sea then comes back fifteen years later having mysteriously not aged a day. “Did I wake you up this morning too?” 

“Only when front door closes,” Alexei says, putting the book down. “What’s ‘pulsing member?’”

“Another word for penis,” Kent says before he can stop himself. “Why?”

“I’m not knowing those words,” Alexei says.

“Not that. The door.”

Alexei squints at him. “Is this why you’re not sleeping?”

Kent shrugs without saying yes or no. He doesn’t want him to feel bad, he just can’t shake it. Alexei scoots over on the couch and pats it, as though Kent needs an invite to sit on his own furniture, but as Kent just reappeared when he should be sleeping he’s willing to let it slide. He sits. The leather is warm from Alexei’s body heat and Kent tries his hardest not to notice.

“Don’t have to worry,” Alexei says earnestly. “It’s not big deal.” He hesitates visibly, then pulls his bottom lips between his teeth for a second as though he’s about to say something he’s not sure he wants to. “From home, papa always coming home late. Not always so much a good thing he’s back, you know?”

Kent thinks he does. He remembers Gretchen coming back to the house in the middle of the night. He remembers the yelling, the crying, the urge to go downstairs and do something. He remembers Adam throwing a pillow at him and telling him to stay put, that there was nothing either of them could do, but if it was going to be either of them it was going to be him. “I-- yeah. My mom left when I was eight. It was kind of-- I was kind of relieved, actually. I know that sounds… I know it’s-- She just never really wanted to be a parent, I don’t think. I can’t-- anyway. I get it.” Kent isn’t pleased to have his suspicions confirmed, but he’s also a light sleeper, also someone who finds it difficult to turn off the part of his brain that watches to see any trace of incoming change of mood.

“Mine never leave,” Alexei says. “Even when we’re all want him to. Not so bad person, but at home when he’s there we all careful. Sister and brother and me.” He shrugs, smiling lopsided. “Lots of noise, but nothing else. Like big dog.”

Kent pats him awkwardly on the thigh before he can talk himself out of it. “Sorry.”

“Not sorry,” Alexei corrects. “Go take nap, you have game. I’m watching later, pick up tips for beating you next time.”

Kent does, the nagging tension abated somewhat. It finally makes sense that Alexei wants to spend the break here though, on some level. Kent doesn’t think he could deal with going somewhere noisy and filled with happy families and sleep well either.

-

Kent sees the hit coming, that’s the worst part. He’s got the puck, he passes it out to Ando and then rushes for the forward shot, and then from the corner of his eye he sees the defenseman lock onto him, and Kent’s fast, he’s fast as hell, but he just doesn’t edge out quite enough, and the defenseman catches his skate.

Kent goes down diagonally into the boards face-first and breaks his nose with the kind of crunch he thinks he might be hearing for at least three or four weeks. The adrenaline sustains him and buoys him through the pain, and he gets up from where he’s been mashed into the ice and spits out a mouthful of blood onto his jersey to finish the play, but the lineman whistles him off.

Kent is angry enough to yell about it, but then the pain hits and he realises he’s still bleeding sluggishly from both nostrils and can’t really breathe right, and then the next thing he knows he’s in medical getting his nose set by Dr. Martin, her grey hair set in a lovely bun that Kent nonsensically focuses on while she prods his bones back to where they ought to be with unrepentant fingers.

If anything it hurts more than breaking it in the first place, but he'd asked her to after hearing that if they don’t do it now they’ll have to wait until after the swelling has gone down and then there might be remodelling already. Kent doesn’t scream, but only because there’s cotton balls in his mouth and tubing up his nose and he doesn’t want to swallow any of them.

When she finally releases him the press is still waiting, so Kent pastes on an approximation of a smile, wishes for the painkillers to kick in and asks “did we win?” with as much levity as he can manage.

The answer: loss in overtime. Kent knew already, but this way it’s a soundbyte, a funny video for the internet, and nobody asks him how he’s feeling, except for how it feels to break a bone in his face.

If he was less woozy from the percocet he’d be punching walls. He’s already texted Ando to ask for a ride home, and sure enough he’s dressed and ready when Kent finally makes it back to the players’ area to get his stuff, but for a split second Kent thinks he’s much, much higher than he’d previously assumed, because his dad is standing next to him. Kent stops himself from rushing in for a hug just in time, gingerly patting him on the back and letting his dad encircle him for a quick second before he has to pull back, nose throbbing horribly. “What the hell are you doing here?” 

“Your uncle can manage without me,” his dad says. “You, on the other hand, look like ten miles of bad road.”

“Still got all my teeth though,” Kent manages, giving in to the old joke between them.

“So far,” they say at once, and Kent is so glad to see him he thinks he might actually not be able to keep it together long enough to get home.

Ando clears his throat. “I’m still happy to drive,” he says. “I don’t know how you got here Mr. Parson, but--” 

“I took a cab from the airport. I called earlier but you weren't in. I figured I'd surprise you," he says, and then Kent loses the thread of the conversation. He wakes up more-or-less when they pull into his driveway, and Kent has the feeling he’s forgetting something, but the painkillers have really kicked in now, and he’s having a hard time keeping his head upright. He’s always been way too sensitive, he thinks, giggling a little at the double meaning. Sensitive is a strange word, so he says it out loud, kind of, marvelling at how slowly his lips are moving.

Ando makes sure he and his dad get to the door without any mishaps, and Kent knows on some level that he’s going to hate this in the morning. His has been a career remarkably free of major injury, and while a broken nose doesn’t count in the top ten worst hockey wounds by a wide margin, the painkillers are keeping a dull, thumping ache at bay that’s still managing to be distracting. Kent feels kind of like he’s about to sneeze at any moment, but the only result of that would be agony, or just his nose flying right off his face.

It’s only when Alexei opens the door wearing a robe that Kent manages to remember the thing he’s been trying to mention for half an hour. “Dad, this is Alexei,” he manages, sort of. He pats Alexei in the middle of his chest. “He’s big. This’s my dad.”

“Off to bed with you,” Kent hears, and then somehow he’s out like a light, or like a winked-out lantern, flame doused by synthetic opiates and adrenaline crash.

-

Kent wakes up and regrets it immediately.

Kit makes a noise that sounds like a lawnmower going over gravel and digs her claws into his chest, and every movement provokes a starburst of pain from the center of his face. He makes it to the bathroom and back before he sees the glass of water by the bed with a straw in it and a bottle of painkillers.

Kent groans, the last twelve hours coming back to him in a rush of awkwardness. He imagines his dad coming into the room while he was passed out and leaving him his prescription and the water and seeing the wreck that is his bedroom and stops himself at the last second from burying his face in his hands. He drinks the water but leaves the pills, wanting to at least be lucid for the awkwardness. He doesn’t see his phone, which is good. That means that someone confiscated it to stop him tweeting in a drug haze. Kent remembers the PR incident of 2011 when he had his wisdom teeth out and spent a day doing nothing but sending the internet at large pictures of the inside of his mouth with a wince.

When he finally makes it downstairs he’s treated to the sight of Alexei in the middle of explaining something about Russian hockey to his dad using Kent’s salt and pepper shakers and the egg timer as the first line and an apple as the opposing goalie.

The weirdest part is that his dad is participating, asking questions and pointing to different stand-in objects. Kent isn’t used to it, is all. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen him take less than a day to warm up to someone, much less willingly engage them in conversation. “Hi,” Kent says, when Alexei stops mid-flow and looks up at Kent’s entrance. “Sorry, don’t stop.”

It comes out horribly nasal, but there’s nothing Kent can do about that.

“Alexei was just telling me about how the rinks in Russia are bigger.”

“I’m explain to Leo that game is faster, more room on the ice for different plays, we not getting so much in the physical.” He grimaces apologetically at Kent. “I’m see it happen on TV and think I should come, then think... maybe not.”

“Okay,” Kent says, thinking of what he might be willing to chew that won’t make him regret existing on a physical plane. Suddenly Kent wants nothing more than to take a huge mug of something hot back to bed. He’s meant to be on a break anyway, so he might as well. The feeling of dissociation is back, that arm’s-length sensation of piloting his body at a distance, and he can’t tell what’s provoked it this time. Maybe it’s the creeping knowledge that he’s benched for a least a few weeks and that this break isn’t just three days where he gets to sleep in and spend at least one morning jerking off slowly. Maybe it’s that two days ago his house was empty and now it’s full and something in Kent is certain that the warmth in the kitchen has nothing at all to do with him. 

Kent’s dad is watching him carefully, with that look in his sharp blue eyes that Kent remembers from when he was a kid and he and Adam used to fight. It’s the one that always precludes some kind of talk, gentle and always a little too adult, because his dad has never quite known how to talk to children, even when he was left on his own with two of them.

Kent starts making tea, lamenting the loss of coffee in his life in a vague sort of way, when Alexei takes the kettle out of his hands. “Go sit. I’ll do it.”

Kent stands in the middle of the kitchen for a second or two before he shrugs and goes back to bed. By the time he hears the kettle whistling he’s got his Kindle out and the Scottish people have done something dumb again and somebody is bleeding. Kent knows the feeling.

It’s not Alexei who shows up in his room with the tea, though. “Hey,” his dad says, tossing an ice pack on the bed. “You should really be icing that.”

Kent can’t argue so he just tilts his head back and tries to situate the weight of the synthetic slush in such a way that it doesn’t actually press on the bridge of his nose. “Pretty pathetic, huh?” It comes out sort of like it might be a joke. He doesn’t chance actually looking at his father, just in case he can tell that it isn’t.

The mattress depresses, weird expensive memory foam distorting around the weight of another body. “You guys are looking great this season.” He pauses, and even though Kent has his eyes closed he thinks he knows what’s happening: Leo Parson staring into space, a line cut in between his eyebrows as he tries to figure out what the hell to say. “I didn’t think I’d be interrupting anything by coming. You could have told me. I don’t know what I did to make you think you couldn’t have. You didn’t have to lie.”

“I didn’t lie!” It seems urgent to refute it, but somehow it comes out childish. “He’s just a-- just a friend, okay? He invited himself too, it’s no wonder you’re getting along.”

“Put the ice back,” Leo says gently, guiding his hand back to his nose where Kent has lifted it to look at him. “I’m trying to understand. I don’t know when you decided it would be better for me if you just never told me when you were hurting, but I don’t-- What did I do?”

Nothing. The answer is nothing.

Nothing but staying silent when Kent never managed to fake interest in girls and saying anything besides “I hope so” when Kent tried to ask if Gretchen was alright. Nothing that wasn’t quiet praise for his hockey after Adam got his GED and dispensation to leave at seventeen and it was just one year of the two of them together. Nothing but miss the moment when Kent could have said something and didn’t, before he left for Canada. Nothing but not noticing Kent was scared all the time that someone would know just by looking at him, when he thought the only way to get to the top was to be so good nobody would ever touch him.

Kent knows it isn’t fair to blame his father for Kent always being able to tell when there was a bad mood in the house even when tried to hide it, or fair to blame his brother for just ignoring the way, even years after Gretchen left, Kent kept whatever tiny distance he could manage from them both because some days it was just too much to walk in on them fighting.

Kent’s never had any doubt about this faltering, tentative, once-burned kind of love, because his father’s here and he did everything in his power to make sure Kent could play hockey, which was a gift Kent will spend a lifetime trying to repay. But he’s never quite managed to convince himself that the best way to make sure the acute pain of separation never happens again is just to make sure it’s never him that’s the cause.

“Thanks for the ice,” Kent mutters.

“He seems nice,” Leo says. “Adam would have liked him too.”

Laughing hurts so much. Kent should really stop doing it. “First lie of the day.”

After a second his dad joins in, his ex-smoker’s rasp a relief that Kent grasps onto with both hands.


	4. Chapter 4

Kent was four the first time he ever skated on his own, sixteen before he ever saw the inside of an airplane instead of just the long trails of their flights from a distance. He was seventeen he first time he kissed a boy and it was with his whole cracked heart, just on the edge of figuring out that happiness was something light, something fragile like a glass bubble growing inside him, pushing out the knowledge that what he was might wreck him one day, no matter how early he started skating, no matter how good he was at the thing that got him out of Utica.

The thing about glass is that it breaks if you’re not careful, and Kent wasn’t a careful boy any more than he’s a careful man. He thinks he might have heard once that learning caution is part of growing up, but cautious and careful are not exactly the same thing. Kent has always managed to be cautious: cautious of who he is, cautious of what he says, cautious of letting too much of himself rise to the surface. The media trainers love him. He’s always got a smile ready and can speak for an hour without saying anything at all. 

Jack Zimmermann is the same, and that’s the problem.

Careful has an implication Kent doesn’t understand until it’s too late: to care for something the way he cares for Jack isn’t a cautious act, because Kent throws his whole self into it, every jagged edge and every unhealed bruise and every sharp snap-recoil of fear. He throws himself headlong into it because it feels amazing, it feels as though playing with Jack, being with Jack is some kind of a home inside himself.

Jack doesn’t. Jack doesn’t, but he doesn’t say anything. He just lets Kent break himself on him while he fights the spectres of expectations: his own. His father’s. Kent’s.

Kent was just shy of eighteen when he rolled Jack over and realised he was barely breathing, and his first thought was that somehow he had done it, that somehow he should have been able to see all the signs of deep, hidden panic, because that’s what Kent does. That’s why Kent is a demon on the ice even though he’s never going to top 5’10” and he’s never going to edge anyone out on muscle. That’s why Kent always knows exactly what to say to rile someone up. Kent is always watching, but this time he was too close to see anything but what he wanted to: happiness.

The day of the draft Kent hadn’t slept, hadn’t spoken, had called Bob from Jack’s phone and then passed it to the nurse on the ward because he couldn’t force anything out of his throat. 

Kent was just on the cusp of eighteen when he got a call from his brother in Pendleton asking him if it was true that he’d gotten into some kind of drug trouble in Quebec, and if he was going to have to come out there and kick his ass, and Kent had hung up on him.

And then it was just Kent heading to Las Vegas, slowly pulling shards out of his stomach and dropping them behind him like bloodied breadcrumbs for when Jack woke up.

 -

Alexei wakes him up in the middle of the night by shutting the door just slightly too hard.

Kent sits bolt upright in bed, melted icepack sliding to the floor with a wet smack as Kit hisses in his ear. “What-- what are you doing in my room?”

“Sorry!” Alexei whispers, “I’m going.”

Kent is not awake enough for this but somehow is much too alert to go back to sleep. He hates painkillers. “What?”

“Book an early flight, don’t want to be in the way with you and family.” He starts edging towards the door. “I’m think is rude to leave with no goodbye, but then I’m not want to wake you.”

Kent throws the covers off and attempts to remember where his feet are, that underslept skin buzz of sudden wakefulness throwing him off balance. “I… hang on, one second.” He flicks on the bedside lamp, and Alexei is thrown into chiaroscuro relief, shadows clinging to his usually smooth, rounded-off face. “You don’t have to leave. It’s only two more days, anyway.”

Alexei hesitates, leaning back against the door as though he might somehow be able to make himself smaller, impossible as that is. “You’re wanting me to stay?”

“Yes,” Kent says, incautiously, immediately, without thinking about it. He doesn’t know him, but he does. Alexei’s told him something, as a gift. Kent isn’t stupid. He knows this isn’t a good idea, or a careful one, but Kent is still tired, still sore in a way the injury is just highlighting, and he doesn’t want to wake up to another empty room when it’s really morning. “Do you want to come in?”

Alexei flicks his eyes down Kent’s body, and Kent wonders about what it would feel like to press his thumb between his eyebrows and smooth out the frown pulling them together, to sweep away the lines above his eyebrows and watch his face relax.

Alexei climbs into Kent’s bed with all his clothes on, and Kent doesn’t even mind. He turns the light off and rolls over onto his side, pillowing his head on his elbow so nothing will jar the splint he’s still got taped to his face. He’s not concussed so he can’t even blame impaired judgement. “Why me?” Kent asks him, in the dark where it won’t show on his face or in his eyes, and any thickness in his voice can be blamed on other things.

“Only one to say the truth,” Alexei mumbles. “And for long time I’m wondering why is so hard to like you and I’m-- for me, I’m thinking maybe is not that. Maybe when you’re play dirty hockey--” he breaks off. “I’m very angry sometimes, but I think I try to leave it on the ice. But still I’m think when you tell everyone that I’m angry at you, and I don’t know why. Then I realise I’m angry with me also. For being afraid. For being-- for knowing I can’t do same thing and just be so easy, with family still in Russia.”

Kent reaches a hand into the darkness and finds the warm skin of Alexei’s forearm over the covers. He takes a hard grip, pressing into the corded muscle. “Hey, wanna know a secret? I’m not brave. I’m just really, really fucking tired.”

“I’m not want you to think if I kiss you is just because--”

“If you try to kiss me right now I’m actually going to put you on that flight,” Kent says, strangled. “But you can stay if you want.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to go back to sleep,” Kent says, “that’s kind of number one.”

Alexei chuffs a laugh. “And then in the morning you’re maybe kick me out.”

“Yeah, we’ll see.”

 -

Kent’s first memory isn’t hockey. It’s being six years old and sitting on the stairs, watching his mother keep forgetting what she needs to leave the house: back and forth from the door in increasing frustration, seeking out small shoes and then her keys and then remembering Kent is meant to have a packed lunch for school and that they’re already late. He can still feel the spike of panic from when she burst into tears, can still remember his too-short fingers seeking out her hand and her too-tight grip on him in return. He doesn’t remember what she said, or whether they ever made it to school that day. He just remembers knowing he was making her sad and wanting so desperately to fix it. To fix himself.

As an adult, or mostly an adult, he knows there wasn’t anything he could have done at six, or five, or seven, or ever, really. Gretchen never calls anymore. For a while she called on birthdays until Adam stopped talking to her and then she never tried again. In the back of his mind Kent thought maybe when he made a headline of himself she might get in touch, but if she didn’t show up at Adam’s funeral, Kent announcing he likes men in public isn’t going to pull her out of the woodwork. It doesn’t stop him from wondering, though. Everyone’s life is filled with what-ifs: what if I’d been a better son? What if she’d been cut out to be a mother? What if happiness was a thing you could give someone, like a book or a picture or a smooth bit of stone that they could hang on to?

Kent’s what-if isn’t just Jack. It’s what Jack is to him. What if Kent had been able to fix him? What if Kent had kept his mouth shut when he drove to Samwell and said the thing he knew would hurt the most because he was so sick of hurting alone?

What if Kent was a better person who could actually move on, who could let go of the dead weight of a lost summer and the hideous jealousy that Jack gets to have a boyfriend and a life and still be a coward?

-

Alexei snores so Kent doesn’t quite manage to fall all the way back to sleep, but he dozes in and out of a series of vivid half-dreams, the kind where he knows he’s not all the way unconscious but can’t really direct them or bring himself to snap out of them.

In one he’s falling through the ice to whatever’s underneath it, some kind of suspended world where people skate by above him and Kent presses his fingers to the sheen of frozen water and finds it solid, one-way. In another there’s something he has to do but he can’t figure out what, and everyone keeps matter-of-factly telling him he should really know already.

He wakes up for good around six, but despite his best efforts to be quiet he bumps Alexei with a knee and that’s that, they’re both staring at each other with what Kent thinks might be mutual caution.

“Sorry,” Kent mutters.

“It’s okay. I’m missing the flight,” Alexei says, glancing at his watch with a little grin.

Smiling hurts less now than it did a year ago, which really says something about how good his media training is. Kent listens to the noise of the house for a minute: it’s a habit he’s gotten into over the last few years, listening for the sounds of the pipes and the faint hum of appliances, the noise of Kit grooming herself somewhere in the room, having been ousted from the bed by Alexei.

Alexei who is watching him with some kind of hesitant expression lingering around his mouth.

  
Kent wasn’t kidding about the kissing with a broken nose, but there’s nothing to drag him out of bed this morning any more than there was yesterday. This time he doesn’t force himself.

“Hey,” Kent says. “Can I ask you something?”

“Seems fair,” Alexei responds dryly.

“What’s your favourite colour?”

Alexei says it in Russian first, then repeats it for Kent. “Green. Why?”

“No, I’m still going. Favourite food?”

Alexei grins and says something in Russian. “I’ll make.”

Kent pauses. “Have you ever been-- I mean, with guys. What was that like for you at home?”

“I’m very careful,” Alexei says, after a long pause. “But I wasn’t so easy with knowing. At first I’m always trying with girls, always finding some reasons for breakup.” He rolls over onto his back and looks at the ceiling. Kent is abstractly thankful that his bed is far too large for him. He pictures Alexei in his bed from childhood, in the room he shared with Adam, shoulders crowding out the narrow twin, and tries not to laugh. Kent might have always hoped he’d finally get that growth spurt his coaches were hoping for, but he’s pretty intimately acquainted with the drawbacks of size he hears from the other guys. It’s just strange to try to imagine Alexei as younger than he is now, as a child who grew into a man. Kent finds that he can’t. He doesn’t know enough to conjure himself a picture.

“I never tell anybody else,” Alexei says, glancing back at Kent, gesturing to encompass the bed, and them in it. “I’m never risking it.”

“Does it bother you that if anyone finds out you were here there really will be rumours all over the internet?”

“No.” Alexei says it vehemently, with what Kent hopes is conviction and not just denial. “People just looking for talk.”

Kent takes a deep breath, remembering Alexei waiting for him in that parking lot downtown, remembering the weight of his hand on his back, the tentative way he’s been looking at Kent, as though he’s got something he wants to say but not the words to do it. The way he invited himself over to just see if two people without much in common besides the obvious could be a quiet space for each other. “And if it wasn’t a rumour?”

“I’m not sure,” Alexei says, running a hand through his hair before turning back onto his side, inching closer to Kent until his face is Kent’s whole field of vision. “I’m having… people who maybe are not safe, if I say it’s true. But maybe if I say it’s true then other people get some good too.”

Kent isn’t nearly so high-minded. He leans in and presses the lightest of kisses to the corner of Alexei’s mouth. Alexei keeps very, very still, not even breathing until Kent pulls back. “For later then,” Kent says. “When you’re sure.” He does it, finally, the thing he’s been thinking about for days, pressing a thumb between Alexei’s eyebrows and smoothing away the frown. “No pressure. But I can’t do it again, the sneaking around thing, the dirty secret thing. Even if it’s not serious, I’m done. I’m done hiding.”

“Not dirty,” Alexei says, catching Kent’s wrist. “It’s not feeling dirty to me. Difficult, maybe. Easier when it’s not me, but not-- no.”

That’s a new one for Kent, he thinks. Live and learn. It turns out he can still surprise himself, because he lets Alexei hold his wrist for a long time, lets himself be looked at, lets Alexei see him with all his bruises on display before he kisses him again on the other side of his mouth, completing the bracket, and gets out of bed.


	5. Chapter 5

Kent is done with painkillers even though his face still feels a like he broke it. Probably because he did, but now that the swelling is going down and the bruises around his eyes are a vivid purple instead of a kaleidoscope of red and blue he’s got more energy to burn than he actually needs. He drives his dad to the airport after breakfast on the 25th after assuring both him and Alexei that yes, really, it’s fine, no, he’s not taking the drugs anymore. 

He says goodbye to his dad in the cafe in departures over the coffee Leo takes plain black no matter where they are.

His dad drags him in for another one-armed hug, avoiding forcing Kent to protect his nose, splint or not, but the smell catches him faintly anyway, not much but just enough to trigger the memory: the same deodorant he’s been wearing his entire life, cheap detergent and old cotton, the slight tang of sweat. His dad hates the Las Vegas heat and always has, but he’s never said a word about it to Kent, who only knows because when he was a kid he’d always catch him opening every window in the house and running all the fans even when they were tight on electricity.

His dad has always been bigger than him. He and Adam were the same height, just over six feet, but Kent is built broad and blonde like Leo and Adam was slender like Gretchen, not a spare ounce on him. It’s nonsensical, probably, to be thinking about this now, but Kent isn’t used to the rush of memory the scent of him provokes, of the three of them together: his dad showing up at hockey games for the last third if he got out of work on time and crushing Kent into his chest when they won. His dad driving him home in the dead of winter with the windows in the car cracked open for the breeze. Adam’s refusal to be hugged where his friends could see, the group of boys at school who ignored Kent but grudgingly insulated him from the inevitable bullying that came with undeniable talent. His dad putting him on the first plane in Syracuse because he didn’t have a passport and couldn’t drive Kent the nine hours to Rimouski.

When Kent pulls back he’s a little blurry, but a flew blinks clear it up. “Safe flight, okay?”

“Most likely,” Leo says, leaving his hand on Kent’s shoulder. “Are you planning on coming back to New York this summer?”

“I’m planning on the playoffs,” Kent quips.

His dad squeezes his shoulder hard, then lets go. “Me too.”

Kent makes it home around noon and finds that Alexei has left all the dishes in the sink and is nowhere to be found, but Kent is actually kind of relieved he’ll have a few minutes to himself. He opens the fridge just to see what’s in there and decides he might as well start setting up for lunch.

Kent is no great shakes in the kitchen but he’s also capable of not burning water, something which has lent him a reputation as a chef by NHL standards. Just because he actually makes things for potlucks instead of buying chips these days doesn’t mean he’s an expert but even so, he gets a certain amount of pleasure out of concocting something rather than defrosting it. Also, he’s noticed that Alexei will eat meat but doesn’t seem to actually enjoy doing it and will eat all his vegetables last after dispensing of anything red and bloody in as few bites as possible. Kent thinks he’s neutral on fish, so he starts thawing the big thing of swordfish he’s had a vague plan to sear for a week or so and sets himself to chopping vegetables.

Kent is deliberately thinking of nothing when he looks up and sees Alexei in the doorway watching him. “I help?” he says, when Kent catches him at it.

“Yeah, okay. Wash this?” 

They manage a mountainous stir-fry which Alexei eats most of and Kent thinks even the fish goes down okay. Alexei doesn’t ask about how it went at the airport and doesn’t say a word about Kent’s reserve. Kent is even grateful when he heads back upstairs for a nap and Alexei seems content to amuse himself with the Xbox.

The day slides lazily into evening, and then it’s night all of a sudden. The sun goes down with a blaze of orange through Kent’s living room windows and Alexei pauses the game as Kent reappears. “I’m get cab for tomorrow?” 

Kent kind of wants to drive him to the airport too, but doesn’t want to press him if he’d rather Kent didn’t. “Whatever you want,” he says, doing his best to stay neutral. The thing is, he wants to do a lot of things: he wants to settle on the couch and let Alexei put a long, heavy arm over his shoulders, to take pictures of Alexei teasing Kit with the ribbon she’s obsessed with, to press him down by the hips and watch his face while Kent blows him slowly. But even knowing that, even admitting it, he can’t roll back on the promise he’s made to himself by deciding not to hide anymore. He was serious about sticking around for Alexei if and when; Kent isn’t quite so oblivious to his own desires that he won’t admit he might be willing to be a first if not a forever, but the one thing he can’t be is the subject of denial again. If that means being a little awkward in his own house for a day, so be it. Kent has learned a lot about self-preservation since August.

“What you are thinking?” Alexei asks him. “Are always smiling like that when you thinking.”

“Smiling how?”

Alexei makes a face that looks a little constipated, an attempt at a crooked smirk sitting badly on his broad features. “Like this?”

“Please never do that again,” Kent manages, suddenly acutely aware of how his mouth has pulled to the side. “Do you want to pick the movie?”

“No, you choose.” Alexei makes room for him on the couch. “I’m not speak English.”

“Liar,” Kent says, refusing to fixate on how easy this is, how quickly he’s gotten used to Alexei’s weird sense of humour and easy occupation of his space. “I’ve seen you reading my books.”

“Very educational,” Alexei informs him, wide-eyed and earnest. “I’m never knowing all those positions. Seems maybe like some are impossible, but if it’s in books, must be true.”

Kent snorts and then regrets every choice that has led to this moment as his nose throbs violently in protest.

Kent falls asleep on Alexei’s chest watching Big because Alexei has never seen it, and when he goes to bed he knows that even if he will definitely wake up when Alexei leaves he won’t have to see him off. It feels better knowing that it’s an ellipse, not a full-stop. Not a one night stand he’s going to have to lie about or something both of them have agreed to forget about. It’s a possibility, but more than that, it might be a friendship.

 _Glad you came_ Kent texts him, when he knows Alexei will still be in the air.

A few hours later Kent’s phone buzzes on the table while he’s stretching his hamstrings. _Next time I’m host,_ Alexei says, with a string of closed parentheses.

-

The evening of the 26th Kent expects the practice rink to be deserted. Years ago, he’s spoken to the rink manager about his extended ice time and whether it was causing problems for the custodial staff. The end result had been that Kent had unintentionally won some brownie points and assurances that the zamboni would be just as effective in the morning if he went to skate at night, and a keychain with a little miniature puck on it if he wanted to close up himself.

He’s kind of been assuming that he’s the only one with this privilege. Kent is therefore shocked to discover that the place has a few lights on and that Ando, of all people, is skating loops backwards with a huge smile on his face.

Kent steps out onto the ice and watches him for a second before Ando notices he’s there, skidding to a stop but refraining from giving Kent a snowshower. “Hi,” Kent says. “I’m joining you.”

Ando looks conflicted. “Should you be skating?”

“Definitely not, but I’m doing it anyway.”

“I’m not sure I should let you. I might get fired, and I don’t wanna get fired. I like it here. We missed you at Christmas skate.”

Kent thinks he heard something about how Ando’s parents were also in town but they must also have gone home, or are just very tolerant of Ando taking off for the evening to go skate alone. A part of him would have loved to regale Mr. and Mrs. Andrews with stories about Ando’s bathroom etiquette, but nothing in the world could compel him to show up at optional Christmas anything. “Christmas is a scam, you know that, right? You’re lucky I haven’t protested that dumb video yet. I can’t believe I wore that lightbulb.” Kent skates slowly past him, relishing the smooth glide of the ice and the sound of freshly sharpened blades.

Ando grins at him as he keeps pace. “Whatever. We get presents.”

“How come you’re such a wise-ass? When I was a rookie if I so much as opened my mouth Swoops would shove a sock in it. Am I a bad captain? Should I be striking more fear into your heart?” Kent changes direction on the diagonal and Ando does a half turn to follow.

“The first week I met you you texted me cat memes, showed up in the locker room with your shirt on inside-out not once but twice, and you pretty much told me that now I’d made it through camp I should be concentrating on team play instead of impressing you, and man, I take that to heart. That was _deep._ Also, nobody’s afraid of you.”

“Okay, shut up, you loved the cats.” Kent is being careful, but the reality of it is that nothing relaxes him like this does, the easy movement of his body across the rink, the steady rhythm of skating, even without purpose, keeping him fluid and reminding him that even though he’s going to be benched for weeks it’s not the end of his season by a longshot. Even Ando’s unexpected presence is kind of welcome. It reminds him of being a rookie in an surprisingly good way, remembering how he used to be the guy who spent more time on the ice than anyone else. Ando skates along next to him without chatting, and Kent suddenly wonders what might have been different if Kent hadn’t come straight to Las Vegas bleeding. If he’d been someone a little less raw and a little less terrified, if he’d showed up in his off time to skate for pleasure instead of just to make sure he was keeping his speed edge because it was the one thing that might make his career great instead of good. Ando was NCAA and came in as a free agent, already pretty settled in himself after a few years of what Kent has secretly labelled ‘normal shit’ like doing homework and learning how to do laundry without the weight of a professional hockey career taking up all his time and energy. Kent has always sort of wondered what the appeal is, and what it might have been like to hedge his bets like that. It was never an option for him, but he still wonders. He could have asked Jack, maybe, if they were different people to each other. “Hey, can I ask you something? What was college like?”

Ando switches to skating backwards again, spinning around in front of Kent so he can see him. If he’s nonplussed at the segue he doesn’t show it. “Well, imagine being the only black guy in North Dakota and you’ve got your answer.”

Kent winces in sympathy. “But what was it _like?_ I barely went to high school, indulge me.”

This time Ando does look at him a little bit strangely, but doesn’t ask why Kent is so interested all of a sudden. “It was fun. I met some great guys. Sometimes I wonder if I should have done the Juniors, but my mom would have literally flattened me if I didn’t at least try to finish my education, and it was good, actually. I liked the classes. At least I didn’t show up here only one step up from needing someone to tie my shoelaces. I see the others guys who did J though and I wonder if I missed out on that kind of-- I dunno, it seems a little culty, but some of these guys have known each other since they were kids, right? I mean, you and--”

“Yeah,” Kent says, starting a long figure-eight across the middle of the rink. “Me and Zimmermann, we don’t talk much anymore, but it’ll always be-- it’s hard to explain if you weren’t there, but that kind of thing just doesn’t go away.” Even if one party has done his absolute best to pretend it never happened.

Ando doesn’t ask if the rumours are true, even though Kent is braced for it. Instead, he just nudges Kent with an elbow then skates out of reach of potential retaliation. “Bet you didn’t get to go to any keggers though, did you?”

“Want to know a secret?” Kent whispers, aiming for confessional. “I’ve never done a kegstand.”

“You’re also terrible at flip-cup. It’s internet legend.”

Kent laughs, knot in his chest unravelling at last. “That’s not fair. That girl was a fucking mutant. Also she had lefty advantage.”

Ando laughs, then falls into rhythm with Kent again, looking ahead as they turn a corner on their outside edges. “I can’t imagine coming to this at eighteen though, right? Like, at eighteen I was still trying to figure out if I could make toast with a microwave.”

“You’re only twenty-one now,” Kent points out.

“Tomato-potato, bro. I’m wise, embrace it.”

“Remind me you said that next time I find you trying to get your stress ball off the light fixture with your own shoe.”

Just for that, Ando does something acrobatic on one skate that Kent can’t risk replicating for the outside possibility of falling and re-injuring himself, sticking his tongue out when Kent gives him the finger. “Hey, so you know this poker night thing we’re hosting for the medical center? Is it cool with you if I invite someone? I don’t want to get all up in your life, but are you… seeing anybody we don’t know about? I know it’s not really my business, but I figured I’d ask. You can always make me do a forfeit if you’re mad.”

Blindsided, Kent stops, throwing a spray of ice shavings. “I’m-- no, I mean. Wait, are you trying to set me up?”

“Maybe.”

“Why?”

When they first became road trip roommates, Kent got to know the determined expression Ando gets when he’s attempting to be earnest without getting mocked pretty well. “Because I like you, and I’m sort of terrified you might one day be found three days after you’ve died half-eaten by your monster-truck cat,” Ando says, leaning on the gate as though he might have to flee at any second. 

Kent forces himself to look offended, enjoying the fleeting panic in Ando’s eyes. “You take that back,” he says, pausing for effect until Ando starts to look genuinely afraid. “She’d definitely eat my entire corpse.”

Ando cracks up, but stops short of actually roughing Kent a little, which Kent is very grateful for. Still, Ando has a hand on his arm when he says: “So I can ask Brian?”

Kent doesn’t want to explain the complicated mess of feelings he’s been desperately unpicking since Alexei showed up, or the strange lightness of knowing that he could say yes, he could be set up on dates and be given shit about his lack of game and be worried about by his teammates like this, too. “You can invite anyone you want,” he says, when Ando starts to look nervous again.

They skate in silence for a while, then Kent leaves when Ando goes for the sticks he’s got propped up by the gates and starts shooting at imaginary targets. If Kent lingers he’ll want to join him, but after this long he likes to think he knows his limits. The temptation is too much, and once he starts playing he’ll be unable to stop himself from wanting the win so badly he can taste it. Besides, if he gets caught playing one-on-one with a broken nose when he shouldn’t even be skating the trainers might actually have a collective aneurism. So Kent goes home, eats leftovers and does his best to clear his emails and ignore the small traces of Alexei’s departure.

-

Kent is benched for four weeks total, and when he finally manages to convince medical that he’s okay to go back in they suggest a full-face mask for at least the rest of the month. No matter how irritating Kent finds it it’s better than not playing at all. The net result is that the Kent spends four weeks watching disjointed play from the bench and being able to do nothing at all about it except stew in his own frustration at not being out there with them. He’s still benched for the All-Star so he watches it at home on the couch. Alexei and Jack have gone, as well as Mary and Swoops repping the West, and it looks like fun. Kent would have asked Henrietta to help him avoid it as soon as he heard Jack was on the roster again but one side effect of injury he’s willing to see as a silver lining this year is that he doesn’t have to. He still kind of wishes he could have, though, if only to spend a few days back East, maybe take Alexei out for a drink and bump knees under the table and watch something neither of them care about, just for the pleasure of company.

Then finally January is over and Kent is back on the dot again. It feels like home. It’s not like the Aces can’t win without him; Kent has invested the better part of his adult life in making sure they can, in trying to lead by example and make sure he keeps himself to the highest possible standard, but he likes to think they’re better when he’s on the ice with them.

After almost nine years he thinks he might be able to say that much. The truth is he’ll always go as far as he can for them, and it’s always been one of the only true, uncomplicated things in his life. He keeps up with the stats and scoring of the Falconers as well, and finds himself checking his phone after his own games to find an inevitable series of texts from Alexei.

Kent texts him the recorded sound of a vuvuzela when he reads that Alexei’s scored and that’s it. It’s friendly, and Kent is happy. It’s only very occasionally that Alexei messages him in the middle of the night.

Those are the ones Kent saves: the ones where Alexei tries to explain Russian TV, the ones where he’s had an odd dream he thinks Kent ought to know about, the memorable pictures of Alexei’s exaggerated frown with the ‘my neighbours have LOUD PARTY’ captions. The ones Alexei sends because Kent is someone he texts when it’s the witching hour, and somehow that makes Kent want to preserve them in amber. He’s never been that person to anyone before.

-

On principle Kent is indifferent to Valentine’s day but it’s big business in Las Vegas, so every year the Aces host a dinner and poker night, with the proceeds going to charity.

Every year Kent sweeps the tables and now none of the Aces will bet against him. 

It’s probably one of those little known facts that the hockey press would love to make something of if it got out: Kent Parson loves to gamble. While that’s an essentialisation of a more complicated state of affairs, the truth is that Kent loves cards, and has loved cards extensively on roadies when playing for skittles and in the Q when playing for cookies someone’s mom had sent up from home and then after his first playoff summer in Las Vegas with his freshly-shaved beard and his name on the Stanley Cup and more money than he’d ever seen in his entire hometown.

He’s not a big spender or a grand bettor, but if Kent’s poker face can’t get a workout at actual poker then he’s been living in the wrong town for most of his adult life.

He sits at a table full of the kind of rich assholes who’d spend over a thousand dollars a plate to have dinner with hockey players and takes them moderately to the cleaners. He doesn’t wreck them as deeply as he’d like to, but he’s happy to tell himself it’s for a good cause as he loses a few more hands than he ordinarily would. The thing about poker is that it’s a face game. Sure, the cards matter, and there’s a certain element of luck to it, but Kent isn’t up against professionals. He’s up against people who expect him to be a certain way, to look a certain way, to behave a certain way. He’s up against people who’ve got schedules full of charity balls and senator’s dinners and board meetings, and they’re easy because if they expect him to be cocky and a little rough around the edges he can do that. He’s been doing that for years. The one thing nobody who doesn’t know him could accuse him of being is earnest, so it feels kind of great to just slide into place and sweep chips off the table and into the box to be tallied by the end of the night.

Kent shakes hands with a grey-haired man in an eight thousand dollar suit and smiles the smile he’s been leaning on for most of his life, the one that says he thinks the guy should be glad to have been beaten. “Thanks for playing,” he says, aiming for perfectly polite and landing somewhere to the left of smug.

Kent goes back to one of the smaller tables with a glass of cold champagne once the photos have been taken and the crowd is dispersing a little.

“Wow, harsh,” says the guy who drops into the seat opposite him. “I thought you were going to take pity on him in the third hand, but I guess I should have known all hockey players are competitive assholes.”

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” Kent says, pausing with his glass tilted at an angle towards his mouth. He looks the guy up and down, recognising him from Ando’s table with the rookies. “I’m Kent,” he offers, tempering his win high and extending a hand. “You’re Ando’s friend, right?”

He laughs. “Yeah, Liam said I should come talk to you, then kind of shoved me in this direction, so no pressure or anything. I’m Brian.”

Brian is about Ando’s height but where Ando is the kind of guy who, like Kent, would rather go on live TV in his underwear than have to make an effort to tame his hair for black tie, Brian is sort of preppy and put-together looking, high cheekbones and light brown skin with greenish eyes and the kind of laid-back posture that says he’s not nervous at all. Kent doesn’t believe it for a second, but it’s nice that Brian’s not awed, at least. “I guess Ando’s told you all about me.”

“He said to be nice about your cat or we’d never make it to first base.”

Kent laughs, and it’s genuine for the first time all night. Brian has a warm voice, the kind of voice Kent could enjoy listening to for a few hours. If Kent was still in the closet, he’d maybe offer Brian his room number at the MGM and take him upstairs for a while and then drive himself home uncomfortably sober with an ache in his chest.

Kent is always buoyed by a win. It feels even better when the people he’s beating are the kind of people who made noise about how him coming out gave uncomfortable attention to the Aces, the kind of people who have season tickets as corporate perks and give money to Republicans. It feels kind of amazing to lean into Brian’s space, to bump his elbow and flick his fingers across his wrist where Brian’s dress shirt has ridden up and to do it in full view of anyone who might be looking. “What are you going to tell him if I shoot you down?” 

Brian smirks at him. “Come on, dude. I’m kind of out of your league.”

“That’s literally true.” The laugh Kent gets for that one makes the tendons in Brian’s neck stand out stark against his throat, and Kent wonders what it would feel like to set his teeth against them. He pulls back a little, glancing over at Ando’s table, where Ando is giving them both an excitable-looking thumbs up. He looks back at Brian, who is watching him with undisguised interest. Kent leans back in his chair and reclaims his glass. “So how about you?”

“What about me?”

“What would stop me from getting to first base with you?”

Brian considers him, eyes going heavy-lidded. “I’m not sure. I can think of something if you’d rather not.”

In the other room, the band starts playing. Usually this is when Kent excuses himself. Reputation or not, he can always make the excuse of professionalism, and before this season nobody would ever have had evidence to contest it. He contemplates his champagne glass before he holds it up to Brian and drains the whole thing. “Wanna dance?”

Brian grins. “Why, so I can be a headline on Deadspin tomorrow morning? I’m a publicist, I know not all publicity is good publicity. That’s just something we tell our clients when they fuck up so they won’t fire us.”

Kent feels warm all over. The cumulative effect of steady, responsible drinking and the cards and the unique, unknown rush of flirting with someone without looking over his shoulder is making him reckless, making him feel as though he could say anything and it wouldn’t come back to haunt him at all. “If I was still in the closet I’d just ask you to meet me upstairs,” Kent confesses, “but now I’m not actually sure what to do. It’s kind of a new thing for me.”

“I noticed,” Brian says, dry but not unkind. “How about you let me take you to dinner sometime? It’s kind of the least I can do for Liam anyway, tonight was worth it for the crowd alone.”

“I love being a pity date, that sounds great,” Kent says, making a show of rolling his eyes.

Brian leans across the table and reaches a hand into Kent’s jacket, finding the inner pocket and slipping out his phone. He hands it to Kent, who is suddenly a little short of breath. “Unlock this so I can put my number in it,” Brian tells him, “and we’ll go from there.”

Kent is doing what he’s told when his sixth sense for impending disaster kicks in. In his peripheral vision, there’s quick, unobtrusive movement. The official photographer leans in and snaps a picture with the full flash of Brian replacing Kent’s phone, one hand laid over Kent’s knuckles so he keeps still enough for Brian to reach.

Kent’s first instinct is to recoil, then he remembers how little it matters and starts to laugh for real, pillowing his head on his folded arms. “So,” he says, between breaths, “what was that about avoiding Deadspin?”

“Can’t win ‘em all,” Brian says, blithe and assured. “Want to go over and put Liam out of his misery? He looks like he’s about to strain his neck trying to eavesdrop on us.”

Kent glances at where Ando is doing exactly that. “Nah, let him stew for a bit. Pretend I said something funny.” 

“I don’t think he’d believe that,” Brian says, but he’s smiling.

He’s got a great smile, Kent thinks. He sits back up, props his chin on his palm and extends a thumbs-up to Ando, watching Brian’s grin widen. Kent likes it, he decides. He likes this casual, easy flirting, this lightness, this unhurried ebb and flow. He likes knowing he might still be making the front page of whatever shitty gossip site is in this month but the person he’s with isn’t already prepping their denial. It feels good. It feels _simple._ It might even be what it’s like to be normal for a night, and with that thought, a little piece of something breaks off inside him and floats away, leaving him cleaner in its wake.

-

Kent goes home alone, 99% sober and smiling.

He makes himself tea and loosens his tie, settling at the kitchen island to drink it. He pulls out his phone and sees that he has a text from Alexei. He sets his mug down, making sure it’s far enough away from the edge that Kit will have to work to bat it off the counter and texts him back. Something about never having enough socks. He hesitates for a second, then taps out _I met a guy tonight. He wants to take me for dinner._

Alexei types for a while before the message arrives. _You want to go?_

 _Yeah,_ Kent sends.

Alexei doesn’t reply right away, but as Kent is scrolling Twitter the message pops up: _Good )))_

Kent looks at the now-familiar Russian approximations of smiles and wonders if he’s missing something by not being face-to-face with him. Not for nothing, but Kent has often wished that Alexei lived closer than Providence, all the way on the other side of the country. He hasn’t made Alexei any promises, he doesn’t think. Just the offer to still be there if he’s ever ready. Kent doesn’t think he’s reneging on that, but still he spends a few minutes staring into his tea before he sends: _are you okay with it?_

Again, the typing animation goes on for far longer than the message itself seems to warrant. _Am happy for you!_ Alexei says.

Kent doesn’t need his permission, but he hopes he means it, not least because the thought of losing him, even if Kent can’t have him and can’t ask him to give more of himself than he’s able to, is too complicated a knot to untie for himself tonight. _Thanks. Good luck against the Wild tomorrow,_ Kent tells him by way of a sign-off, and goes to get ready for bed.

In the middle of the night Kent wakes up to the chiming of his phone.

 _Don’t want you think I’m mad. Is good thing, someone take you out, be seen, maybe have a good time._ Then: _I’m sad is not me._

Kent almost sends back _me too,_ but then he hesitates. _When you’re ready,_ Kent tells him, even though it aches.

-

Kent is on Deadspin the next morning.

'Kent Parson Finally Gets Cosy With A Dude In Public!' Is by far one of the nicest things Deadspin has ever put print to about him. Past articles have been about how he’s simultaneously overrated and also not being used properly on Team USA, (true, but he wants that captaincy like he wants a fucking root canal) how he’s an inconsistent scorer (lies) and speculation on whether he’s taking attention for himself when hockey’s premium is team play by coming out. Henrietta keeps track because once when Kent was a rookie he read everything printed about him and called her near tears at four AM on a Sunday asking her if she really thought the Aces had made a bad call placing him on the first line.

Now he’s banned. It’s only because Ando texts him a screencap with a bunch of fireworks emojis that Kent even knows, but he throws his phone across the room anyway.

Ten seconds later he picks it up and reads the article. It’s mercifully light on speculation about his past and is a tolerable if weak pass at not being offensive, even if the undertone is that Kent is doing something risque.

He sends it to Brian, who has probably already gotten it from Ando, with “still want to get dinner?” as the caption.

Kent’s phone rings. He answers on the third chime, trying to school his voice to calm. “Hi.”

“I know you guys have crazy diets, so you pick the restaurant." 

“Is that how it’s supposed to work?”

“I don’t know,” Brian says, “I’ve never been on the news before. I’m mostly the guy who makes sure news happens the way my clients want it to. Your call.”

Kent laughs and checks the chart taped to the fridge. It’s past the midpoint of the regular season and Kent is starting to go spare around the middle, skin clinging tighter to his muscles, cheeks starting to hollow a little under the onslaught. If anything it’s happening later than usual this year, his month on the bench leaving him a shred of extra padding. “I’m supposed to be eating right now, so as long as I can get a protein fix and a pound of carbs it doesn’t matter, I stop tasting food after midseason. There’s only so many times I can force my way through six meals a day and actually enjoy it.”

“Jesus. Should I have suggested a movie?”

“Nah. I know a place.”

Four days later Kent is sitting in the Cheesecake Factory in Caesar’s Palace wearing sunglasses and a shirt that he’s just realised has a button missing halfway down his chest, and not for the first time he wonders at his own capacity for self-sabotage.

He’s flicking pages on his Kindle without taking in a single word and drinking his third glass of free water when Brian shows up. He’s perfectly on time and he looks great, light brown skin brought out by a blue shirt and dark jeans, and his open, easy smile. He spots Kent and takes a seat, tipping the screen of Kent’s book down with a finger. “Fancy,” he says, but there’s no sting in it. “I had you more as an In-N-Out guy.”

Kent hastily sticks his Kindle back in his pocket. “Is that a come on?”

Brian laughs with his entire body somehow, as though he genuinely thinks Kent is funny and isn’t going to give him shit for it. “Oh my god, where is your mind?”

“Hockey, mostly,” Kent says, relaxing. He takes his sunglasses off and decides not to care about the missing button. “You hang out with Ando, you should be used to it.”

“Fair.” Brian takes a laminated menu and checks it out. “So what are you having? I’m prepared to bankrupt myself, I’ve been warned.”

Kent orders his usual and true to his statement he barely tastes it, just making sure he eats as deliberately as possible. It’s a game night tomorrow and he is hungry, but this time the food takes a backseat because Brian is talking. Carrying the conversation with ease. Kent watches him and listens, and wonders if this is what it’s like to just say what’s on your mind about whatever the topic at hand is. Brian is forthcoming and funny about moving to Las Vegas and about how great it was when Ando got signed here, and when he tells a story about his cousin Priya doing something scandalous at a family wedding Kent laughs so hard he almost chokes.

When they’re winding down Kent hasn’t even been keeping track of whether anyone has their phones out to film them. They split the bill because Kent would feel a little weird letting Brian pay for all of it when Kent has more money than he genuinely knows what to do with, and then there’s a lull, a pause, a held breath. It’s eight thirty at night and Kent is stone sober, has to play tomorrow and isn’t sure what to do with his hands. 

“Hey,” Brian says, voice low for once. “Dessert at my place?”

Kent’s mouth is as dry as the canyon, but he swallows and says yes.

Dessert doesn’t happen, but Brian lives close enough to get to quickly, in an apartment that’s laid out all open-plan, one entire wall just windows facing the lights. “I haven’t lived here that long,” Brain explains, when he catches Kent staring. “I just wanted to be near work.”

Kent takes off his hat and tosses it on the coffee table. “It’s nice,” he says. “Where’s the bedroom?”

Brian drops his keys on the side table, grabs Kent by the shirt and draws him to the door in the far corner of the square living room.

They shed clothes in a gratifyingly mutual rush, and then Brian is nipping up under the hinge of Kent’s jaw, pressing him down on the bed, trapping his wrists when Kent moves, just hard enough, just the right kind of control. “You good?” Brian asks, words a vibration just below his ear.

“Yeah,” Kent sighs, meaning it. There’s no rush to this, is the thing. No need to get on his knees right away for the promise of reciprocity, no driving urgency of discovery, no toxic thrill of the illicit. Just the weight of Brian’s body over his and the warm, liquid heat in Kent’s solar plexus he has all night to deal with.

Brian sits back and looks at him. Kent does his best not to squirm away, not to hide his eyes under his arm no matter how much he wants to. Kent has the kind of relationship with his body that treats them both like separate entities, in a way. He thinks of his physical components in terms of time: How long can I go on this left knee? How many years before hip surgery? One day soon that right hand is going to grind just a little too deeply. Most of all, Kent is aware at every moment of its demands; he’s been learning to manage them for decades now, most of his life, and he can’t ignore that time is never on the side of the mind when it comes to hockey. The spirit will be willing long after the flesh can no longer sustain the effort. Pleasure has taken a backseat along the way somewhere, become secondary to need. Kent has never learned to take his time with it, to sink into the sensation of touch without noticing a dozen other things clamouring for his attention.

Brian sweeps a hand over the sharp cut of Kent’s right hip with a look of faint awe. His hands are slender and cool to the touch. It’s so good it’s nearly painful, and Kent thinks _to hell with it_ and opens to his full range of motion, grinning at Brian’s sharp intake of breath.

The deep ache is worth it, and keeps being worth it until morning when Kent wakes up in someone else’s bed and doesn’t panic at how he got there.


	6. Chapter 6

Kent got the call from his dad very early in the morning. “Kent, it’s… Adam is-- I wanted you to hear it from me,” he’d said. “In case someone got ahold of it and-- and ran it as a story and you saw it, or something. I-- he’s…”

“He’s not on tour,” Kent had rasped, confused and half-asleep. “He’s in-- he’s not due to go back for...” He couldn’t even remember when Adam was meant to be leaving the country again. For some reason, that has always stuck. “I-- a while, right?” 

“It was-- he was on his… They said the truck came out of nowhere.”

Kent had flopped back into his pillows, surrounded by his white bedroom in Las Vegas, the climate control running at a low hum in the background. “A car accident? Really?”

“I don’t know,” his dad had said, and it wasn’t a denial of the facts. It was exactly what Kent was thinking: three tours in Afghanistan, and it was a fucking car accident. How could that have been possible, when even Adam had been prepared for it to happen another way on another continent, something he’d never quite let either of them forget? How could it be so random? How could it be so fundamentally _meaningless?_

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Kent had said, fingers numb from how hard he was clutching the phone.

“Can you come home?”

Kent’s first, treacherous, ugly thought was that he didn’t want to. “Yeah, it’s-- yeah, I’ll be on the next flight.”

He wasn’t, but his dad never called him out on it.

The first thing Kent did was go out as soon as it got dark and get plastered, rage welling up from somewhere viscous and secret and ugly, a burst oil pipeline of clinging anger that made Kent feel filthy all over. Filthy and selfish for all the things he’d been waiting to say and never did, and now would never be able to. The second thing he did was find someone bigger than him and willing to use it and let himself be pushed around until he felt like it was okay to scream and claw and bite, and when he left right after, he’d shrugged off the hand on his shoulder and the well-meaning “hey, are you okay?” of a complete stranger with a quick smile and an old lie. _I’m fine,_ he’d said, and almost believed it.

And then he went home.

-

The buzzer sounds on regular time and the Aces are skating away from a 6-1 win. Kent slams into Swoops in the goal, thumping his shoulder in glee. “Playoffs!” he manages, before he’s being piled on by the rest of the team. Three of those goals were his, and Kent can feel his teeth in his mouth, can feel the blood in his arteries, can feel every fibre of the soaked layers of his padding clinging to his overheated skin. He emerges from the scrum with a whoop, every ache in his body chased away by jubilation.

There’s noise all around, but Kent’s entire world is victory for a blazing moment before he has to skate up to his opponents and put his face back on, before he has to go talk to press and make plans with his trainers and go drink as much water as he can manage.

They’ve made the playoffs, even if it’s just the first round, even if they’ve done it before, but this time it’s different. He’ll tell the press it’s the same when they ask, and they will, but he’ll leave the soundbites about how the Aces have embraced him and how Kent hasn’t detracted from team play to other people, but it’s not the same. It’s _better_ , and it’s better because if Kent goes out with the team to celebrate he won’t be the one nursing a beer in the corner and watching all the guys with their girlfriends and wives and trying not to resent them when he should be just as happy. It’s better because if he invited Brian and he came, the team wouldn’t care at all, and to hell with anyone that does.

Kent makes it through press with a barely-suppressed smile and then he’s the last guy in the locker room, stripping off his thermals and taking his time in the shower. 

He checks his phone before he gets dressed, still warm and pink from the water and the win, and among the slew of congratulations from guys on other teams and one from Brian -- he knows that Kent’s ritual is to turn his phone on after the game and has taken to texting him just because he knows Kent will see it before he sees him-- he spots one from Alexei. Kent grins and thumbs it open. _Falconers are wildcard! See you in finals! We will beat you, you watch!_

 _Bet you dinner that you don’t,_ he taps out, then heads to the car. There’s talk of beers at the place downtown that’s been doing half-price flights of Belgian microbrews, and Kent is sort of planning on going. He’s lost in his messages when he nearly runs bodily into Brian.

“Wow, and here I thought hockey players had good spatial awareness,” Brian says, steadying him with a hand on his shoulder. “Liam snuck me in, hope you’re not mad. I was thinking I could congratulate you in person.”

Kent is so ready for that to be a thing that happens regularly that he just reaches up and drags Brian down for a kiss. Brian pulls back, mock-grimacing, and carefully turns Kent’s hat backwards. “I don’t know why, but every time you wear it the way it’s supposed to be worn it just looks wrong somehow.”

“We made the playoffs,” Kent says, not caring at all, still jubilant, settled in a little alcove in the back hallways of the arena that’s almost his second home by now. “It’ll still be--”

“Conference finals, I know, and then the last series, I know how hockey works.” 

“Do you?”

“No, but I have the internet. And I did grow up next to Liam, remember? It’s all he’s ever talked about, except for that time he got really into Pokemon.”

“You’re telling me that story later.” Kent hitches his bag higher on his shoulder, biting his lip at what he wants to ask, unsure how Brian will react but determined to at least pose the question. “Hey, do you want to come out with us? We’re getting a beer downtown.”

Brian makes a big show of looking at his watch. “So does that mean it’s going to take longer for me to get you home?”

“Playoffs mean I’m going to be pretty busy,” Kent says, making a show of thinking about it. “I’m going to be with the team a lot.”

“Then I might as well join in.” Brian falls into step with Kent as he heads for the exit. “Think I count as a WAG or do we have to come up with a different category?”

“I guess we’ll see,” Kent says. Truthfully he doesn’t know, and there’s no real way to tell how it will go whether it will be awkward, whether there will be one or two guys who are fine with him in principle but who might not actually want to be confronted with the evidence, but Kent will deal with that if and when it happens. For now it’s a small victory. It’s a whole string of small victories in battles Kent never knew he was fighting.

-

Their second date happens at Brian’s apartment because they never make it out the door for dinner.

The third time Kent suggests a movie. They walk out of halfway through because Kent is always restless and tired in equal measure at the theater no matter how many times he manages to convince himself he’ll make it all the way through. They end up back at Brian’s again, eating takeout on the couch before Kent slides a lazy hand under Brian’s shirt and they forget about the movie and the food both. 

The fourth, Kent wakes up in Brian’s bed when Brian kicks him by accident and decides he might as well make breakfast. Kent likes the easy rhythm of it, even if he isn’t sure what the hell he’s doing. It’s so new to wake up sore in a good way, not smelling of smoke or tasting the lingering miasma of bars in the back of his throat.

They don’t really talk about much. Kent would like to, maybe, but can never seem to broach anything of substance. It’s not because Brian lacks it; far from it. He’s far better read than Kent could ever hope to be. He’s got opinions on things like Syria and the state of US-Pakistani relations and the relative merits of different kinds of social media and works pro-bono sometimes for a local charity. It’s just that Kent doesn’t quite know how to break past the blockage in himself that wants to deflect any time they start edging into territory Kent still isn’t used to exploring. He doesn’t know how to talk to Brian about home, or how to explain it when he catches another asshole he’s going to have to block leaving some bullshit on his Instagram. Brian’s not a public figure, he doesn’t deserve any kind of referred pain from Kent’s life.

It’s easier to just enjoy his company and listen to him talk, because Brian is painfully funny, and Kent feels like he’s just come up from a deep dive whenever he shows up. Whenever they go anywhere in public Kent has to fight with himself not to look around to see who’s looking at them, even though in Las Vegas most of the time the answer is nobody. They’ve been seeing each other for a couple months, and Kent thinks maybe it might be worth asking Brian if he sees other people too, but he can’t decide whether he thinks he’d be okay with it if he does. He’s not sure how it’s supposed to work, if he’s supposed to make assumptions or just ask, but Brian never asks him who he’s texting in the middle of the night, so he figures it’s a conversation for later, if this keeps going.

If Kent never quite manages to stay asleep the whole night when he stays over with Brian --inevitably something moves, and the unfamiliar ambient noises in his apartment sound much louder at night-- if he checks his phone on the couch at four AM when Alexei wakes up on the East Coast, that’s still fine.

It’s better than fine, unless Alexei texts him a string of texts about nothing followed by the one thing he actually wants to say: _I’m not sleeping well. I think about getting cat. Things are bad at home._

Kent aches to call him sometimes, but he knows Alexei would never say anything over the phone. Occasionally Brian walks in on him and gives him some good-natured shit about not getting his beauty sleep, but he doesn’t push and Kent doesn’t tell him.

 _I miss you,_ Kent tells Alexei, even though on the surface there’s nothing to miss. _Good luck._

-

The night before the regular season ends happens to be the night before Passover. Kent is so tired that he’s planning on getting an early night, and then maybe he might see if there’s a Seder in town he could sneak into. It’s so rare for it to coincide with even a lull in season play that he hasn’t made plans, and then with playoffs looming he won’t be able to go home for any length of time anyway. He's long resigned himself to only being able to celebrate when hockey isn't dictating his time, and while he wishes he could ask his dad out to visit, he knows he'd be restless and distracted anyway.

He’s already in bed when his phone rings. He almost doesn’t answer it, but then Kit’s tail flicks out of the way and he sees something on the screen that looks a lot like Alexei’s text ID picture. He snatches it off the nightstand and fumbles, almost dropping it it on his chest, much to Kit’s vocal chagrin. He thumbs open the call and wedges the phone against his ear, cursing silently. “Hello?” Kent says, heart pounding. There must be something wrong, surely. There’s no other reason why Alexei would actually call. “Alexei, are you there?”

There’s a silence on the other end of the line, and then a long, slow exhale. “Is Passover tomorrow?”

“First night, yeah,” Kent says, nonplussed. “Why?”

“I was looking.”

Alexei enunciates more carefully on the phone, speaks more slowly. It gives Kent plenty of time to imagine the vibration of his voice, to remember the depth of his chest and the rounded-off sweep of his vowels. Kent turns on his side and looks at the vacant pillow, waiting for Alexei to continue, hoping nothing is wrong, that he isn’t calling just to tell Kent that he’s cutting ties now, before it gets harder. Even though Kent wouldn’t blame him if he did. The thought of it hurts, but he wouldn’t even be able to claim it was unjustified. There’s only a secret between them, and it’s not Kent’s.

“I’m think-- maybe I come out to Las Vegas. But then I’m say last time, is my turn next,” Alexei says instead. “Can you come?”

Kent should say no. It’s ridiculous. He shouldn’t even entertain the notion. He’d have to fly there and back in less than forty-eight hours, and the flight is almost five hours long. He’s got tape to watch and plays to plan and if he takes a personal day the GM might kill him. “Is everything okay?” Alexei makes a sound like something wounded. And Kent pushes himself up on one elbow, alarmed. “What happened?”

“I’m telling my family,” Alexei says, very quietly, so Kent has to press the phone closer to his ear to hear him. “I don’t think-- Is not good thing, yet. But I said it. So.”

Kent, for a suspended moment, thinks he’s the worst person in the world. Alexei should never sound like this, this small, cracked voice on a tinny line from three thousand miles away. He should never have given him an ultimatum like this, should never have pressed for something that was too much skewed towards Kent’s own needs. “I’m so-- fuck, I’m so sorry.”

“No.” Alexei says it sharply, and Kent can almost see the cutting motion he’d be making in the air. “Is my decision. I’m not wanting to go back to Norilsk anyway. I’m never wanting to.”

“I’ll take the earliest flight,” Kent says. To hell with the consequences. As long as he’s back and in good shape for the mandatory skate they have in two days time, Kent can do something dumb and reckless. He’s kind of overdue.

Alexei says nothing for a long moment, and then before Kent can even ask him if he’s still there, he just thanks him. It’s quiet and small, and Kent can hear it long after Alexei hangs up.

Kent leaves a voicemail on Jim’s answering machine, emails Henrietta to make sure she knows what shit might be in store, and debates calling his dad to make sure he’s not going to be hit with an onslaught of “what is Kent’s family emergency?” demands. In the end he sends him a message asking him to call right away when he wakes up, and gets out of bed to go find his laptop.

-

The perks of flying first class are that Kent can sleep the whole way to Boston, so he leaves Las Vegas at 2.35 AM and lands at Logan at 7.30, having mostly gotten some rest.

Alexei is at the arrivals lounge in an old sweatshirt and a knitted hat, looking oversized and out of place with his hands buried deep in his pockets. He looks like he hasn’t slept and is already working on a playoff beard, and Kent hates that he has to look over his shoulder in both directions before he holds a hand out. Alexei takes it, his palm warm and wide, then reels Kent in for a hug. Kent lets himself be clung to for a second before his paranoia takes over and he pulls away. “I don’t want you to have to--” he starts, but Alexei just nods.

“Car is this way,” he says, taking Kent’s overnight bag.

The ride to Providence is quiet and the traffic is going the other way, but Kent still has plenty of time to observe him: Alexei has purple smudges beneath his eyes, and the drawn, worn look of someone refusing to admit an injury. Kent wonders whether he’s had a rough second half of the season, whether he’s got something that just won’t ever quite go away, the way all of them do, under their skin. Kent’s right hand has been grinding more lately, bones in the wrist the victims of too many sly slashes just out of sight. It’s nothing tape won’t hold together, but Kent knows what it’s like to walk around feeling every inch of his body, and he knows what it’s like to sit at odds with himself far, far more intimately than that. Kent remembers this, though, the ability Alexei has to be silent and not make it awkward, to exist in the space next to Kent and not feel the need to fill it in with talk, even if every time Kent sees him on camera he’s expansive, filling up whatever room he’s in with a smile and the good humour of someone easy with himself.

Kent has missed it, even after only having it for three days.

They pull into a sunken garage under one of Providence’s waterfront high-rises. Alexei keys them into the building and they take the elevator to the tenth floor, and then Kent is seeing Alexei’s apartment for the first time. It’s all done in warm shades, the kind of careful mismatch Kent has never been able to associate with anything but expensive design, but it feels lived-in, big striped sofas sunken with the weight of bodies and thick curtains swept back to show the view of the river.

Alexei watches him take it in, leaning back against the door. “I’m hoping to have you here,” Alexei says, and it sounds confessional, as though he isn’t sure he really wants to say it out loud but is doing it anyway. “This whole season I’m wanting it. I don’t know how I-- is not so different now, I think. I’m still not sure I can say yes.”

Kent is too awake for the amount of sleep he’s gotten, and somehow not nearly awake enough. He feels overfull, as though everything he should say is trying to get out of him at once.

“Hey, look at me,” Kent says finally, voice thick in his throat, “when was the last time you slept?”

Alexei makes an indeterminate noise. Kent makes a decision right then. He might never have learned how to take care of anyone and he might have taken twenty-seven years to learn how to live with himself, but Kent thinks back on what it was like for him eight months ago and realises he can maybe pay it forward in some way. God knows, he’d have given anything in the world to feel less alone, just for an hour.

Kent takes him to bed, puts him under the covers and climbs in next to him. Finally his breathing evens out, broad back losing some of its horrible tension, and Kent lets himself drift off as well. 

When he wakes up a few hours later, nudged by a straying elbow, Alexei is still snoring. Kent stays in bed looking at him for a while, then slips out of bed as silently as he can. Alexei mumbles and turns over, but he doesn’t wake up all the way, just rolling into the warm spot Kent has left and resuming the deep breaths of heavy sleep.

Kent ignores the stabbing sensation in the soft space between his ribs and goes to find a takeout menu. Before he spots one he sees that Alexei has left his keys on a hook by the door, so Kent finds an old receipt from the airport in his pocket and leaves a note with the ubiquitous sharpie clipped to Alexei’s keychain. _Out for food, back in a minute._

Outside, Providence is still frigid, but spring is slowly creeping in, buds pushing hesitantly from bare branches and the sun glinting off the last clinging heaps of greying snow.

Kent has never had the chance to really explore it, but Alexei lives downtown and nothing seems like it’s very far away from anything else. He makes sure he knows which building is the right one and then sets off. There’s a deli on the corner that looks likely, so he drops in and orders some bagels for Alexei and gets himself something breadless that looks salad-ish. It’s got some Italian meat in it, which seems like it will be filling. The trip is more to divert the restlessness of snap decisions than to actually procure food, so Kent finds himself walking a little bit more, head down and brim of his hat low. He knows Providence isn’t as much a hockey town as Boston or New York but it’s still New England, it’s still East, and the last thing Kent really wants to do today is answer questions about what the hell he’s doing here. 

He finds himself constructing answers in his head: _Oh, I’m not Kent Parson, I’m his twin brother Trent Parson. I’m astrally projecting. I know, neat, right? No, sorry, I’m incorporeal, can’t hold a pen. I’m here to talk someone through realising their family will never take them back and I have no idea how. I don’t even know where Norilsk is._  

He’s so used to Las Vegas that the spring cold sinks into him without him quite noticing until he’s standing on a street corner five blocks from Alexei’s apartment shivering. He spots a department store and ducks inside, hoping the heating will still be on and to get out of the wind coming off the water. He’s standing by a rack of scarves when he realises he’s being stared at by a shop assistant, her eyes narrowed in what Kent knows from long experience is either suspicion or recognition.

He makes eye contact and she comes over, smiling professionally. “Hey,” Kent says, as she approaches and her eyes widen. “I know this is rude, but if I buy something will you promise not to tell anyone I was here?”

“Sure,” she says in a small voice. “I’m, uh-- I saw you play--”

“I swear I’m not just being an asshole,” he says, even though he kind of is. “I was just really cold, and I’m kind of not supposed to be here, so…” He picks up a scarf. “Oh wow, this is soft.”

She laughs into her hands, and Kent has a sudden urge to open a portal to the place under the earth where the mole people live and join them. “It’s cashmere,” she says, still giggling. “It’s on sale, too.”

“I’ll take it,” Kent says, thrusting it at her. He’s got something new, at least. He’s sure it counts, even if it was under duress.

As she’s ringing him up she bites her lip as though she’s trying hard not to say something. Kent isn’t sure why, but as he hands over his card, he says: “Thanks. I appreciate it. It’s just today I’m really not-- I need a better disguise or something,” he finishes lamely.

“I get it,” she says. Her nametag says “Amina,” and Kent has nonsensical thoughts of sending her a fruit basket or something for not making this more painful that he’s made it himself. “Can I just-- one thing?” She says, no doubt emboldened by his awkwardness. “I think it’s pretty great that you came out. It’s been really cool.”

Kent says something that’s probably inane, all his media training deserting him completely in the moment, too stunned by how sincere she sounds. It’s possible that Kent hasn’t actually met any strangers who’ve said anything like that to his face, though plenty of people have said the opposite. It’s a brief, bright shock, and when he steps back out on the street he really is much warmer. The air clears his head, and by the time he makes it back to Alexei’s apartment he’s calmer at least, even if he still has no idea what to say, or what to do.

The shower is running, so Kent hunts for plates and then checks his phone for messages. He winces, alarmed by the volume of missed calls. He still makes sure he texts his dad and promises to call tomorrow. He hopes his dad is going to a Seder with friends, and that he isn’t mad that Kent came East and didn’t see him. He’ll square it later. He thinks it’ll be all right. They’re better these days, he and his dad. Not for the first time he wonders why it is he was so afraid in the first place, before he remembers an endless string of little things, little words, little signs that if Kent wanted to survive he would have to make sure he was always camouflaged. It’s not his dad’s fault. It’s just the world. It’s just Utica and hockey and ignorance.

Thinking about what would have happened if his dad had decided he wasn’t going to accept Kent’s revelation brings the helplessness back, the grasping feeling of not being up to this task. He wants Alexei to get out of the shower. He wants him to stay in there forever. He wants to join him.

Kent takes a bite of his lunch and barely tastes it. He has a missed call from Brian and a message wishing him a good Passover. Kent stares at it for a second wondering how to respond, and he realises he hasn’t even thought about what it might say to Brian that Kent dropped his entire life to fly to Providence to see the guy he’s spent months texting in the middle of the night. He hasn’t thought about him at all, and that’s not something he wants to examine right now because it casts a shadow a mile long; if Kent was better at this he’d have told him right away he was going, but he didn’t. _I’m in Providence,_ he says. _I’ll explain when I get back._

Brian sends him a string of question marks followed by _should I be worried?_

Kent doesn’t know what to tell him, so he just says: _I’m helping a friend. I think. I hope?_ because Brian deserves honesty, even if it’s belated. 

 _Sounds like a story,_ Brian says. _Send me your flight details, I’ll pick you up at the airport._

Kent does, and then he turns his phone off.

Alexei comes out of the shower and falls on his bagel like he hasn’t eaten in days, which is worrying for so many different reasons that Kent can’t articulate them all. He watches him, hoping that it’s not just his imagination that’s telling him Alexei looks better for the nap and the bath, and then finally they’re out of food and out of ways to avoid the topic, and Kent is still at a loss for how to bring it up.

Alexei seems equally unsure, but he looks at Kent, leans on the black marble of his counter and lets his still-damp head droop down between his shoulders and just starts talking.

“I’m never talk much about Russia,” he says to his hands, voice only just loud enough for Kent to hear. “I’m playing for her and when people are asking, I’m saying the right thing and nothing else, but I think all the time how easy it is here, how easy to walk outside and have everything, how much I am afraid for leaving.” He still isn’t looking at Kent, but Kent is hanging on his every word, and can’t bring himself to interrupt. “Is very hard to leave Norilsk if you are not university student, or if you are not good at something. Money is good, too. Is very far north, and in winter the sun is gone, so when people go, they are paid. Sometimes I’m think--” he looks up at Kent at last, an unfamiliar twist to his wide mouth. “Sometimes I’m think maybe I take a friend to visit, but can’t go there without permission, if you’re not Russian. Even sometimes when I’m think maybe I’m going home, I try to stay in Moscow, because in Norilsk is only family. Now, is not even that. I’m telling my sister first, and she tell me not to tell my parents.” He shrugs, straightening to his full height, jaw clenched tight. “But if I do what I want to here, they have to know. They have to say they are not my parents anymore, or maybe it will be bad for them too. So I said the truth. Maybe I never tell anyone else, and go back to Moscow.”

Kent has an image in his head of an Arctic wasteland dotted with open holes, like the moon, and can’t imagine Alexei emerging from anywhere like that. Not when he exudes warmth and calm, when he’s got an easy smile and loves the sun and made friends with Kent’s finicky asshole cat in a day and a half. “Do you-- do you want to?”

 “No,” Alexei says. “I’m not sure how to be-- to be careful forever, or how to lie and accept that I’m needing to. Some people can, and some people are living lives there which are good lives. I’m-- not me.”

Kent swallows hard, entire body aching to touch him, but unsure how he might be received if he tries. A part of him is still wondering if Alexei has done this for Kent, and whether he regrets it. He might not right now, but in a few weeks, in a few months… Kent doesn’t know what he’ll do if Alexei stops talking to him.

A few moments in his life stick out with clarity like this: Kent goes to him over the back of the couch, landing hard and barely feeling it. Kent is nine inches shorter than Alexei and a third of his weight, and Alexei still goes soft and pliant as Kent presses his hands to the warm slope of his shoulders, pushing him back against the fridge until Alexei is looking down at him with a kind of dazed, hungry expression Kent has never seen before. Kent has a decision to make, and it’s important that he makes the right one. “You told me I’d done something brave, right? No, don’t say anything, I don’t know if I’m saying it right so I’m just-- anyway, listen to me. I’d already lost half my family when I came out. I didn’t-- it wasn’t like this for me. It wasn’t…” he swallows, hard. “If nobody’s proud of you, they’re wrong, okay? I am.” And then he’s pulling back, because if he keeps touching him, Kent will do something stupid and reckless, and he doesn’t want it to be like that with Alexei. He wants it to be right, and he wants it to be good, and right now Alexei looks as though a stiff breeze would shatter him. “I’m really glad you called.”

Alexei hesitates for an instant before he reaches for Kent, but all he does it bury his face in Kent’s hair and shake.

-

He heads back to Las Vegas on the first flight, and sure enough, Brian is waiting for him with what looks like a bag of doughnuts and some coffee. Kent is glad to see him, but the sight of him is tempered by knowing he’s going to have to end it with him. It’s not fair to leave him in the dark, and it’s doubly unfair to expect Brian to put up with him disappearing at short notice with no warning. Kent is ready to just start talking, but as soon as they’re heading away from McCarran Brian beats him to it. “Kent, don’t take this the wrong way, but do you… if there's someone else, just say it. I’m not accusing you of anything, but people tend not to take off like that unless it’s a big deal.”

Kent swallows a mouthful of vanilla glaze before he remembers he's not supposed to and manages not to choke whe he regrets it halfway through. “I’m… I have a-- I guess friend is the best word,” he starts, or tries to. “Nothing happened,” he says, hoping Brian believes him. “He's... I don't know how to explain it, but I promise you it's not-- fuck, I'd tell you if it had.”

Brian looks as though he doesn't know whether he wants to believe Kent, but he isn’t throwing accusations either. “We never talked about being exclusive or anything, it’s only been two months, so I guess taking it slow didn’t really work out, huh?” He sighs, turning off the highway. “So this friend. Hockey player? In the closet?” 

Kent wants so badly to tell him, because he thinks maybe Brian would understand. He doesn’t know when or how Brian came out, but if it’s anything like what Kent’s had to deal with, he might have at least some insight. “I can’t-- that’s not something I can tell you.”

“I’m not asking you to. I just want you to be honest with me.” Brian steals a doughnut out of the bag and stuffs most of it in his face one-handed. Kent reflects on the many reasons he likes him, including his total lack of aversion to eating with his fingers. “This friend. Do you know what you’re doing?”

Kent lets out a laugh that only qualifies because there’s no word in English for the sound it actually is. Maybe the Germans would have a word for the feeling that provokes it, that helpless ache he’s adrift on, trying to navigate. Whatever it is, he doesn’t know it, so instead he tells him as much of the story as he can manage without naming names, but it still feels disingenuous to obfuscate to Brian, whose good humour might have been sorely tested but who is still making a colossal effort to be kind. 

“Wow,” Brian says, when he’s finished. “So I guess we’re breaking up?”

Kent stares at him, shocked that he isn’t furious. Kent’s been braced for it the whole ride, ready to apologise, ready to make himself as small as possible and wait for the storm to pass. “I-- I’m really sorry, but… I think so, yeah.”

“Yeah,” Brian echoes, looking carefully at him between stop signs. “What’s the matter, you look like you’re about to puke.” 

Kent feels like he might, actually. It’s strange, how deeply held the tension in his body is, how hard it is to stop waiting for something terrible to happen, as it surely must. “I-- why aren’t you mad?”

“Of _course_ I’m mad,” Brian says. “I really like you, and I’m really annoyed we didn’t have this conversation before you left, but I guess I can sort of see why.” Brian checks his mirrors and then says, “you’re going to have to direct me from here, I’ve never been to your house.”

“Left here,” Kent says, before he can think about it. “I’m so sorry. It’s just--” Kent wishes he had a roadmap for this, but his only experience with this is Jack: Jack who never called once after he got out of rehab, who asked his parents to speak to Kent for him, who disappeared off the face of the earth while Kent couldn’t stop picturing him nearly as white as the sheets of the hospital bed he was laying in the last time Kent saw him. Jack who looks at Kent as though he’s an inconvenient stranger. “Take a right.” 

They pull into Kent’s driveway, and Brian takes the keys out of the ignition, sipping his coffee in silence as he watches Kent. Kent squashes the urge to hug him, instead just turning to face him, as much as he can. “I’m really sorry. I don’t deserve you.”

“You’re damn right,” Brian says, gently disengaging. “I was really worried about you, you asshole. You’re so lucky you’re good in bed.”

Kent laughs, swiping at his eyes. “Being an asshole kind of comes with being a hockey player,” he says.

“Yeah, I'm starting to get that,” Brian says heavily. “But take care of yourself anyway, okay?”

Kit trips him maliciously when he gets in as retaliation from him leaving her with her mortal enemy, the automatic food dispenser, and then Kent is sliding down the back of his front door, staring at nothing. There isn’t enough room in his body for all this, all the guilt and sadness and terrible relief but it’s all in there anyway, settling like a dropped stone.

-

Playoffs start in earnest three days later. Kent pays a quiet fine, refuses to explain where he’s been, and proves he doesn’t have a drug problem. Jim is furious with him but Henrietta, for some arcane and unknown reason unrelated to her being his agent, gets on the phone from New York and defends him. Kent isn’t sure whether he should be paying her more just for that, and decides to ask her next time they have a meeting.

The guys are excited to be on the ice in the post-season and Kent finds himself swept along with it, skating as hard as he ever has in practice and putting in the hours with the coaches, so when they meet the Sharks in the first round and ride over them 5-2, Kent starts to think it’s going to be a long run this time.

Kent is half afraid Ando might be mad at him that it didn’t work out with Brian, but even though Kent is avoiding the subject like it’s his job, Ando still finds a way to put Kent in a headlock and reassure him that while he’s kind of bummed there won’t be a wedding he can go to yet, he’s not angry that Kent fucked it up. “Hey, I don’t know what happened, but Brian’s not mad so I guess I don’t have to kill you,” he says, mock-serious. “Tell me your secret, are you just really terrible in bed?”

Kent’s relief is objectively disproportionate to Ando’s absolution, but Kent feels himself loosening up anyway.

He’s reading the latest stats on the couch halfway through the division finals, icing his knee with his laptop balanced precariously on his other leg when his landline rings. Kent doesn’t want to answer it, because moving sounds like a hideous idea invented by sadists, but he’s deep in the playoffs hole and all he’s doing is sleeping, eating and playing hockey. It’s probably his dad wanting to confirm that Kent is, in fact, mostly alive.

He dives for it and grabs it on the last ring.

“What have you done to Tater?”

Kent nearly drops the handset, fingers suddenly nerveless. “Nothing,” he tells Jack, venom metallic behind his teeth. “How did you get this number?”

“My parents have it,” Jack says flatly. “I don’t know why.”

Kent debates hanging up on him, but he doesn’t. He must be a masochist, he decides. There’s no other words for never learning not to grab the exposed wire any time it’s presented to him and hoping for a different outcome than a violent shock. “What’s wrong with Alexei?”

“He’s not acting like himself,” Jack says, clipped and formal. “And he’s a friend. Ever since you-- he’s been strange this season, but now he’s off, and we need him sharp.”

“Jack, did you take a C while I wasn’t looking?” Kent snaps, worry beginning to worm its way up his gut to his chest. “Because otherwise I don’t see how you get to say that to me." 

“I don’t know why I bothered, of course you’re not going to listen to me,” Jack says, and before Kent can say anything in retaliation, Jack hangs up.

Kent likes to think it’s not panic that pushes him to fumble his phone out of his pocket and hit the call button for Alexei but he’s well-versed enough in lying to himself that he knows it is. Alexei picks up right away, and Kent realises he has no idea what to say. “Jack called me,” he blurts. “He thinks I’ve done something to you.”

It’s been a few weeks since Kent left Providence, and in that time they’ve been in touch the way they have been all year: Kent rolls over at four to see Alexei texting him when he wakes up on the East Coast. Kent sends him pictures of Kit and of his best bruises from games. Alexei sends him pictures of the ducks he’s determined to make friends with and pictures of the scoreboard when they win, and sometimes he asks Kent if he has plans for after hockey, if he’s always known he won’t have kids, if he ever wants to move back to New York.

Kent has never been honest with anyone the way he is with him, but there’s a limit, a point past which Kent has yet to go; it’s not because he doesn’t want to, but when he asks Alexei how he is, more often than not Kent doesn’t get an answer. He wishes it was easier to see him, to look at him, to watch him move and see the truth there in a way he can’t while limited by the only way they have to communicate. He wishes it was easier to just call, but hearing his voice is never quite enough anyway.

Kent is past pretending he doesn’t want the whole thing, the whole messy, terrifying leap of faith, but he can’t be the only one. In a way, the fact that they’re in the post-season has done what it always does: postpones everything else, shoves out the rest of his life until his waking hours are nothing but hockey, but sweat and pain and if they’re very good, victory. Kent has lived for it for most of his life, and it’s difficult to break the habit.

Alexei says something in Russian that sounds like a curse, then: “Is not his business.”

“I know, but are you… is he right?”

Alexei doesn’t answer his question. What he says instead echoes in Kent’s head and reverberates in his chest for hours, long after he closes his eyes to try to sleep. “If I’m ready to-- I’m thinking I’m ready. I’m not sure, but I’m… I remember when you said how you were tired. I’m very tired.”

“I’m here,” Kent says, because he has to say something. “I’m not going anywhere.”

-

In the last game of the Conference finals, Kent feels the slash across the wrists from Anaheim’s forward like a hot brand, stinging up through the bones of his hands, and something deep inside protests violently, sparks and goes horribly numb. Kent grins at him and plays through it, ignoring the low-voiced insult that chases him up the ice.

Kent wins the last faceoff, passes and then he’s off, streaking forward with nothing on his mind but being in the right place, but getting there faster, and when the puck comes his way he buries it. He barely registers the time going off, but he definitely registers the joy seeping out all over, the sheer bloody-minded happiness of every single body that slams into him in celebration.

They’ve won the Conference. They’re in the Stanley Cup, and Kent looks up at the press box, remembers every thinly-veiled speculation of a publicity stunt, every time he heard through someone else that another article had come out and thinks: _fuck you. I did it._


	7. Chapter 7

The first game of the series is in Las Vegas, and the Falconers fly out the day before. 

Kent remembers past playoff seasons through the lens of failure or victory: the Aces won the year he got drafted, and since then they’ve made the playoffs three times, and won once more. This time shouldn’t feel different, but it does. Kent can’t tell if it’s because _he_ feels different, because most days he isn’t sure he does. He still wakes up and plays hockey. He still takes too many pictures of his cat. It’s only sometimes when he’s not looking over his shoulder that he realises how much lighter he’s been this season, how much he hadn’t known he’d been carrying he’s slowly set aside.

There’s no way Kent is going to sit out an instant of it, which means debates from the medical team and Kent’s trainers about whether he’s making the worst mistake of his career by insisting on playing, because his right wrist feels like it’s all bruise. His mobility is still good, though, and his scans are acceptable, and finally, they clear him.

Kent doesn’t hold over on his own skill the way other people do, but he knows that he doesn’t want to miss a minute of time with his team, who he’s supposed to be leading. He wants to put on his gear with everyone else and play some damn hockey, because it’s what he’s good at, it’s what he loves, and if he gets to put a hand on the Stanley Cup for the third time it will be as himself, entirely. He doesn’t think it’s arrogance to say that he knows they’re better when he’s on the ice, and maybe it isn’t arrogance either, to say it’s not just because he’s talented. He’s the damn captain.

Maybe that’s it, why it’s different. Kent should be exhausted but barely feels it, too sustained by the determination that’s as much a part of him as it is every single other player in the NHL. Kent wants to play, but more than that, he wants to win; he wants to prove that he can, even though he’s done it twice before. He wants to prove to the Aces, his friends and ersatz Las Vegas family, that he’s worth all the hassle and the scrutiny and the pain.

Kent’s not sitting out. 

He gets home the night before the first game in the series and bounces around the house for a while, trying to calm down, then gives it up.

In previous years, Kent has thrown on a song on repeat and read a book for as long as it takes to reach the point of calm at which he can start to think about sleeping. This time he stares at his phone for a while, avoiding the internet in case he gets distracted and falls down the hole of following mentions, and opens his messages.

 _Can you talk?_ He sends it, not expecting an answer right away. Alexei will be doing night-before prep with his team, will be going through his own private list of essentials before they start in earnest tomorrow.

 _Not really,_ Alexei says. _Wishing could, am at dinner with team._ He sends Kent a picture of the table in the hotel restaurant, a few people looking up and smiling. Kent catches half of Aiden Snow’s face, but doesn’t see Jack anywhere.

Kent should wish them luck and go to sleep; everything is on hold for both of them, the driving force behind them hockey, like it will be until this ends, but instead he holds his breath and asks: _Do you want to nap together tomorrow?_

Kent thinks he might have fucked up when Alexei doesn’t answer for a while, but then his phone buzzes against his chest. _Yes,_ Alexei says, with a thumbs-up. _I’m missing your couch._

-

The morning of the game Kent wakes up buzzing, too long before his alarm but not long enough to force himself back to sleep. The Aces group text is already a dozen notifications deep, so he at least isn’t the only one. He should say something reassuring and inspiring but he just forces his way through breakfast and then heads to the rink.

The Falconers will be in the building, occupying the guest locker room and the practice space set aside for them and Kent can’t reconcile it, quite. Everything this year that has led up to these two very separate things colliding: Stanley Cup finals and Alexei back in Las Vegas across the line from him.

He thinks it will have to be an unspoken thing, whatever they are to each other now, while it’s happening. It will have to settle under the ice and wait for them, because Kent has played hockey all his life for this exact reason, and this exact thrill. Victory is so close he can taste it, can feel it just beyond his fingertips. 

The first time, it was fear, plain and simple. The same fear he’d felt at the beginning of the season, that he wasn’t the rookie the Aces were banking on, that he wasn’t going to be able to make it to the end of the hundred-game season without the coaches and management and everyone watching realising he was an imposter here, that what they were seeing was a shell, a skin thrown over something else Kent was at pains --growing pains and otherwise-- to disguise.

This time Kent laughs through morning skate with the guys and brings a notebook to play review with Grieger and his team along with Swoops, his long-suffering alternate.

“You look way too happy,” Swoops grumbles at him, knuckling at his patchy beard. “What are you so happy about?”

Kent ducks away. “It’s not enough that we’re in the finals? You want something else?”

“I want a steak and a beer and for us not to fuck up tonight.”

“I’d drink to that,” Kent says, “but you’re not allowed beer, and I’m going home for lunch.”

Swoops doesn’t keep him. Kent’s not known for his superstitions but everyone is a little keyed up, a little on-edge, and the kind of tired that doesn’t come from just one long night. If Kent’s going home a little early it’s not so out of character that anyone would pull him up on it.

He meets Alexei in his driveway. The deja-vu of it is such that Kent stops for a second, reeled back to December by the sight of him sitting on Kent’s front steps, long legs bent up under his elbows, chin resting on his stacked wrists. “Hi,” Alexei says, a little hesitant.

“Fuck this, tomorrow I’m just going to drive you,” Kent says, pulling him up and letting them in. Kit makes her usual beeline for him but he steps aside. Alexei drops his bag, scoops her up in one quick motion and starts making strangely-accented noises at her. 

They don’t talk. They’re both too keyed up, Kent thinks, but somehow it’s easy to eat, to settle Alexei on the couch and then take Kit up to bed. It’s easy even though he knows that they’ll be fighting for the thing only one of them can have in a few hours, and Kent might be hard pressed to avoid the force of Alexei’s checks, and the intimacy of everything he could say to throw Kent off. He could, Kent thinks. He could, but he won’t.

In the car on the way back Kent doesn’t even care who might ask questions, who might be watching, who might see him drag Alexei into his arms and wish him luck. “But not too much,” he amends, killing the ignition.

Alexei laughs, sound reverberating off the windshield. “Stay fast, then, yes?”

Kent goes to get ready. In the locker room, nobody gives a speech. It’s not their style, as a team, despite the rare occasions Kent has felt he really wanted to say something. Still, he pulls them all together before they hit the ice and says: “Give ‘em hell,” into the circle.

From the instant the puck drops the Aces dominate. Kent can feel it: the zinging feedback of the other bodies on his line, the solid spread of their defense, the intangible sensation of lift that’s the pinnacle of the game. Sweat is rolling into his eyes and he’s got his mouthguard gripped hard between his teeth, and even the persistent ache of his hard-used body fades away while he’s playing.

He’s always been faster than Jack but this time he’s proving it in real-time, watching his face freeze as Kent shoulders past him and streaks for the goal. The next time they’re across the dot he grins at him, wondering if Jack is feeling it too, the weight of hundreds of eyes, the roar of the crowd, the trickle of sweat down the back of his neck going cold in the air. He wonders if it feels as good to Jack as it does to him.

Alexei checks Kent in the second third, managing a burst of speed Kent didn’t know he had in him, and as he’s being knocked out of the way and puck stolen, flicked onto Alexei’s stick then onwards, Kent peels his lips back off his teeth in something that’s not quite a grin and not quite a grimace and gives chase. 

They take the first game in the series 2-1, Ando sneaking the last goal in the last three minutes of play with a look of pure shock on his face when they all pile into him to celebrate.

Kent does press with a smile on his face for the first time in a long while. It’s not until after that he realises he’s looking over his shoulder in the hall for Alexei, hoping he might catch a glimpse of him in the complex somewhere.

He can still feel the hit, can still smell the metallic tang of ice and effort and padding. He lurks for a little while before the exhaustion hits, adrenaline comedown still lingering now that the flashbulbs and the microphones are out of the way. When he gets home he runs himself a bath in the guest bathroom, sets an alarm so he doesn’t fall asleep in it and drown. He replays the game in his head, but it’s not the obsessive, methodical evidence-gathering of a loss. It feels good, despite the aches he’s taken home.

As has become a habit, he texts Alexei before he goes to sleep. _Good hit._

 _Not so good enough,_ Alexei texts back immediately, followed by two in quick succession: _Can meet tomorrow. If you want?_

A little knot in Kent’s spine releases. He knows the Falconers will have obligations in the day and a half between games, just like Kent does, but if Alexei can sneak out for a few hours so can he. _Yes. What did you have in mind?_

-

Before Kent went back to Las Vegas in April, Alexei took him for a walk. They’d gotten drinks to go --tea for Kent, overbrewed and dark, not too sweet, and coffee for Alexei, who drinks it with no sugar but lots of milk-- and walked along the riverfront, early enough that the likelihood of being spotted together was negligible. They’d spotted a bench facing the water, and Alexei had sat down on it, indicating Kent should join him.

It hadn’t been an easy silence, the wind too biting and the constant, ingrained urge to look over their shoulders too difficult to set aside. They had kept a careful distance, at first, until Kent had given up and pulled his sleeves over his hands, leaving only the very tips of his fingers sticking out. Alexei had laughed quietly and slung an arm around his shoulders, and it had felt so like the first time they ever really met, instead of passing at the combine and the All-Star and so many times on the ice. Kent had leaned into his side for a second, chasing the warmth, and Alexei had held him just a little bit too tightly for an instant before he’d eased his grip.

“I guess it must be colder in Norilsk,” Kent had muttered.

“Is Arctic,” Alexei answered. “Krasnoyarsk Krai, high at the top. In the summer, ice from the year before melts, but some years not all. In the winter it’s dark. Is almost like being on different earth. I never knew it could be so different until I play hockey for Russia, travel to Moscow, then-- then others.” Then he’d paused, tipped his head back with his eyes closed and said: “I don’t talk about Russia today. All night I’m talk about it. Maybe it’s hurt-- maybe is less hard if we are talking about something else.”

Kent had felt helpless, right then. Helpless in every sense of the word, so he’d said the first thing he could think of, without a guidebook or a road-map or a how-to. “Passover was for family when I was a kid,” he’d blurted. “But usually the season is still going, or we’re in the playoffs, so I haven’t been home for it in-- years, actually. Wow. Um, anyway. Adam-- my brother was away a lot too, so my dad would try to make sure we got on a call together, if Adam was in the country. Anyway, I’m-- I’m really glad you called me. I’m really-- yeah.”

Alexei had said nothing for a second, and Kent wondered if he’d miss-stepped, made a crucially bad decision right when it mattered most, but then Alexei had said: “I’m reading the story, think I find out more, just because. Don’t want to interrupt things for you, don’t know if it’s such bad time for asking.” He’d looked at Kent as though he was trying to memorise him, for so long that Kent had begun to wonder if they should move, just for the sake of being in motion. “I’m thinking of being in the desert, maybe.” He’d gone quiet, rubbing at the first hints of thick beard as though his hand over his mouth would prevent him from saying something else.

“Well, I live there,” Kent had said, glib, missing the point with his usual impeccable timing.

“Is not what I meant,” Alexei had answered, fingers gripping Kent’s shoulder tight through his jacket.

“Yeah, I know."

Kent had gotten to the airport with less than an hour to spare but had somehow made his flight anyway.

 -

Kent’s day is full with strategy and practice and other obligations to the Aces, but he still has a few hours in the afternoon as downtime. Ordinarily, he’d stay in the lounge at the arena and read the end of the book he’s been working on all season (seriously, at this point it’s just torture, but Kent wasn’t raised a quitter) but Alexei suggests the canyon, of all things. They only have half the afternoon, but, as Alexei points out, it’s only half an hour away.

They end up driving to a viewpoint in the park and just sitting there, sharing the protein bars Kent keeps in the glove compartment of his car while Alexei snaps a picture of his feet crammed up on the dash, looking out at the red rocks. 

“Is like Mars,” Alexei observes, voice a quiet rumble.

“I kind of like it,” Kent says, realising as he says it that it’s true. “I hardly ever come up here, though. It’s like-- it’s right here, but I forget all about it sometimes.”

“Should come more often,” Alexei says, getting out for a better look.

Kent sits next to him on the dusty hood of his car and remembers the last time he came this way, driving in the dark because he just didn’t want to go home. “I broke up with Brian,” Kent blurts out, hastily swigging from his water bottle and telling himself it’s for the electrolytes.

Alexei takes the bottle out of his hands, fingers brushing Kent’s, and drinks from it. “Is terrible, but I’m glad.” He hesitates. “Selfish is the word, yes? For when you are happy bad things happen.”

“No,” Kent corrects gently. “That’s something else. It’s not selfish. It wasn’t fair on him,” Kent says, staring at the sheen of water unevaporated on Alexei’s lips before he forces himself to stop. “Not when I’m--” he searches for a word that isn’t impossible. “Not when I have so much going on,” he finishes lamely. _Not when I’m waiting. Not when I’ve got enough time for someone else to fly across a continent but not enough time to remember to tell him about it._  

“We nap together tomorrow?” Alexei asks, after a beat.

“Yeah,” Kent says, sliding off the hood, leaving a broad streak in the fine, reddish dirt clinging to the paint.

Alexei sings along to the radio on the way back, and Kent wants to listen to it forever, even though he’s half a tone too low and only knows half the words.

Kent drops him at the hotel just in time. He catches sight of a few other Falconers in the lobby, travelling in packs as they get ready for whatever it is they’re doing next. Snow glances curiously at them as Alexei gets out, and as Kent is pulling out he sees the frown Jack directs at the car from the little knot of his team-mates that wave Alexei over, but not even that is enough to ruin Kent’s mood.

-

If their first game in the series is a triumph, game two is a disaster.

Kent and Alexei part at the rink, already drifting into that headspace that comes before a match, the ready focus held in reserve, and as such he barely notices Jack clocking them in the hall, and barely manages to wonder what he’s doing there in the first place. Kent would like to say it’s not Jack’s wont to spend time pacing alone before a match where anyone could interrupt him, but he doesn’t actually know anymore. The thought stings less than it might have a year ago, and Kent lets it go, heading for his own locker room, for his own team, ready to tape himself together and get back on the ice.

It does not go according to plan. Alexei and Kent play the way they have been this year; no holds barred but no dirty hits either, and if Kent thinks he catches a hint of a smirk sometimes it just makes it doubly imperative that he concentrate, that he fall into the easy, practiced communication he’s built up with his line, Ando on his right and Skoller on the left, Mary and the rest spreading behind. It feels good, until Jack’s line comes back onto the ice.

When Jack checks him hard for the third time, Kent shoves him back, mouthing _what’s your fucking problem?_ around his mouthguard. No matter the bad blood between them, this isn’t like Jack at all. Kent loved playing with him for so many reasons, but not the least of them was that Jack played smart and clean. Cleaner than Kent, who’s gone for borderline plays in the past if it meant an edge, a win, or the satisfaction of coming out on top, like the first time he and Jack met on the ice again after Jack disappeared out of his life.

Kent isn’t proud of that, but it’s still satisfying.

Jack shoves him back. “Whatever you’re doing with Tater, it’s not going to work,” Jack murmurs, too low for anyone but Kent to catch. “If it’s a game to you-- people aren’t games.”

Kent can count on one hand how many times he’s been boxed for instigating: four times in a years-long career in the NHL as someone too small, too fast, too short on bad temper to waste time throwing a punch when he can just win by outskating everyone else. 

Kent wants to tell him he’s got it all wrong, but instead, all the hurt, all the guilt and anger and terrible, sickening frustration of the years comes roaring up from where Kent had thought he’d buried it. It tastes foul, like blood and fear and the aftertaste of hospital disinfectant, and Kent suddenly is sick with it, with constantly having to justify himself for existing, for continuing to exist whenever Jack is near. Kent has tried his hardest not to push into Jack’s life, ever since Kent left Samwell University for the first and last time with the look on Jack’s face still fresh and vivid in his mind. Kent knows what contempt looks like intimately after this year, but he knew before, just from that.

Kent drops his gloves, gets low for balance and punches Jack in the jaw.

His right hand screams at the impact, hard enough to jar up to the shoulder, and then Jack --wide-eyed and shocked, mouth an open ‘O’ of pure surprise-- is making a grab for Kent’s jersey, swinging in hard with his other hand.

Kent twists away, catches him by the elbow and then they’re both down somehow, a mess of skates and padding and dropped gear surrounding them like spreading ink. Kent isn’t yelling, or at least he thinks he isn’t, but all he can hear is the high thud of the blood in his ears, and then Alexei is pulling Jack away and someone has Kent by the elbows, half dragging him to the penalty box. 

Kent gets seven minutes, and the Aces lose 3-0.

-

Press is a nightmare. Kent can’t give an account for his actions that isn’t hinged on hurt and fury older and deeper than either of their NHL careers, but that’s why every single one of them is crowded around him tonight. That’s why he has to lie through his teeth about how Jack caught him at a bad moment, about how there was nothing said that spun Kent right out of orbit, about how they’re going to leave it on the ice, the same way everybody does.

Kent wants to grab a microphone and tell the room that every time he thinks he’s tried hard enough to get rid of the part of himself that cares what Jack Zimmermann thinks of him he realises he’s failed. There’s so much failure to account for that Kent can barely tally it all. If he’d noticed Jack was struggling in Quebec he would never have encouraged him to come out to parties for the joy of seeing him give that small, crooked smile. If he’d known Jack thought Kent was only next to him for a thrill, the charged feeling of playing a bad game, Kent would have-- he doesn’t know. He might have tried to convince him, or he might have cracked into pieces much sooner than Jack did.

He has a text from Alexei, but he doesn’t read it, showering slowly enough and with enough obvious disinclination to talk to anyone that he’s left alone even after the press has been herded out. Ando shoots him a worried look but he goes anyway. Kent got a dressing down already from the coaches and has made his apologies to the team, but none of it eases the sting.

 -

Jack is waiting in the hall when Kent emerges from the locker room, tired and restless and sick to his stomach. Kent’s first instinct is to turn and walk away immediately. Kent is still sore, wrist aching between the bones and deep in the joint, and the satisfaction of yanking him down by the jersey and finally getting to discharge the sick tension under his ribs isn’t enough to let Jack Zimmermann have any more of his time than what Kent gave him on the ice. He can still hear the words. He might never stop hearing them.

“Kent, wait!” Jack calls, jogging after him.

Kent makes a show of putting headphones in before Jack reaches him, longer legs catching up to Kent’s determined walk. Kent turns around to tell him exactly where he can go, but then he bites down on it, vaguely stunned at the look on Jack’s face. He’s always had a bad track record with reading Jack; it’s what got them here, in part, but now Kent forces himself to look: Jack looks determined, which isn’t new, and his playoff beard is disgusting, as most people’s are, but more than that, he looks… hunched. A little furtive, like he’s ready for Kent to shoot him down, swelling on his jaw going a vivid reddish purple.

Kent should go home. Kent should warn Jack off and take himself out of his own blast radius, which seems to double any time Jack is near, like some kind of horrible chain reaction, but Jack is hunched against the air as though he expects Las Vegas to reach inside his jacket and run an unwelcome finger down his spine. For once he doesn’t look like Kent is something unpleasant he’d rather just ceased inconveniently existing. 

When Kent stops walking, Jack smiles a little, and Kent’s damnable body responds as though Jack still has a string on him somewhere, a buried hook Kent has never been able to find and dig out, with a slack line he can tug on anytime he wants. It’s barely physical but it isn’t anything else. It’s an echo of a different time, and the mind is a strange thing. Kent knows Jack hates him, but Kent has tried his hardest to hate Jack in return and it just has never quite happened, even when Kent was incandescent enough to drop gloves and earn his penalty minutes with blood between his teeth.

“What?” Kent snaps. “Rematch? You know I’m faster.”

Jack squares his shoulders, bruised jaw tight. “I was hoping we could talk?”

“Yeah, it’s a little bit late for that, don’t you think?”

“It won’t take long,” Jack says. “Please.”

Kent doesn’t want Jack in his car but the underground parking lot is the only way they’ll get out of the area without someone spotting them together. Kent plays whatever is on the radio at near-deafening volume and takes Jack all the way across town, pulling up outside a strip mall on the far side of Paradise where there’s a cafe Kent found once and never went back to. They’re shown to a table in the corner under some chintzy hangings and a picture of some celebrity Kent still doesn’t recognise. They bring menus and Kent orders a hot chocolate.This deep in the playoffs he’s muscle and bone and sinew and nothing else, thin veneer of fat melting by the day, and he could use the marshmallows. “Spit it out,” Kent says, when he’s been presented with something that smells way too sweet for his taste but mercifully loaded with calories, “I’ve got an ice bath waiting at home with my name on it.”

“I don’t want to fight again,” Jack says tightly, long, blunt fingers cupped around his black coffee.

There are a million things Kent could say to that, but none of them are the truth; Kent wants to fight. Kent wants to drag him back to the rink with nobody looking and drop his gloves again, go barehanded and relive the sickening, satisfying impact of skin on skin. He takes a deep breath instead, concentrating on the rise and fall of his ribs. “Yeah? I could go another round.”

“I--” Jack starts, lips curling into a snarl, but then his hand clenches, knuckles going white under the chafed redness, and he hesitates. “Tater-- Alexei told me some of what’s been-- I’m-- I was out of line.” Kent leans back, getting as much distance as possible short of leaving him here. He’d deserve it, probably, but there’s no reason just those words, out of all of it, everything Jack has said and done, should be what makes Kent turn tail and run. There’s no logic or justice to the fear those words provoke. Kent just stares at him, not trusting himself to say a word.

It takes Jack a long moment to speak again, but when he does, it’s the very last thing Kent expects to hear. “How did you do it?” Jack asks quietly, voice a furtive rasp. “How come it was so easy?”

Instantly, the glow of Kent’s anger kindles, roaring back to life from where he’s been slowly working to smother it, telling himself to leave it on the ice, leave it on the ice, leave it on the ice.

“You’re really going to sit there and look me in the face and ask me if it was _easy_?” Kent almost yells. He leans forward, shoving his drink to the side, intending for Jack to listen to every single word he says. “Easy?” It trips off his tongue in a furious rush. “You don’t-- you don’t get to do what you just did and still have the nerve ask me that.” He presses a finger to the center of Jack’s chest, staring at him, daring him to move. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. My dad had reporters camped on his lawn. Henrietta says I got death threats. Fuck, Jack, I-- easy? Really? The only reason I did it at all was because if I didn’t I think--” he’s never verbalised it before, but as he’s speaking it just comes out, whole and fully formed, an old truth in new words: “I think I’d have done something worse to myself if I hadn’t, eventually. Does that sound like it was easy? _Does it?_ I never told my brother and now he’s gone I’m never going to. That was it. It was just-- _I just had to._ ”

Jack says nothing, nothing, nothing, and then he puts a hand on Kent’s left wrist, the one pinning him to the chair like a sword, and leaves it there. Kent presses harder, then drops his hand, letting it fall to the table with Jack’s on top. His face the kind of blank Kent recognises with a horrible pang. It’s the look Kent never could get past in Juniors, when Kent found Jack perfect and impenetrable in equal measure. “Well?” Kent whispers, hollowed out. “Say something.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack says quietly, in French, which Kent only ever spoke with him when it was just the two of them and Kent’s hideous accent wouldn’t be the subject of a round-robin of mockery. It reminds him of being seventeen immediately, as though no time has passed at all, a tesseract in words. “I didn’t know. Even when I told my friends I was-- that I was dating someone, it wasn’t like that. And I’m sorry for how-- for a lot of things.” It’s simple, but somehow Kent had never expected to hear the words out of Jack’s mouth.

He looks at Jack, really looks the way he never quite could when they were kids, when his own want occluded everything that was wrong between them. Jack was never going to be the person Kent wanted, and he’s never going to be able to take back all the times he tried to make him be that person, to convince him to come back, to roll back the clock and slot himself against Kent’s side again. He had no idea Jack was even taking medication, and Kent reflects that intimacy exists in layers, overlaps, small tectonic shifts of trust. They never had that, not really. Not the right way, the kind that doesn’t leave a scar when the skin tears away.

Kent says: “If you’re going to do it, it won’t be easy. It’s-- fuck it’s terrifying. But it’s worth it.”

Before he can change his mind, he takes his hand back and gets up. “I’ll see you on the ice,” he says, switching back to English and pasting on a smirk, brittle and shaky, breath coming too fast. “Better be ready.”

-

The trip to Providence the next evening is subdued, mood on the plane one of preparatory silence, and Kent hates it. He knows he’s the reason everyone is stepping lightly, even if they’d deny it, so halfway through he leans over and loudly asks Ando who’s got a bet going on him to start a fight again. Ando laughs, startled, and yells back that anyone who’d put money on that is going to win millions because they’ve all just witnessed an event rarer than lightning striking, which prompts a rising roar of Aces yelling odds for different, increasingly lewd outcomes.

Kent sits back, satisfied, and Ando looks at him like he knows exactly what Kent is doing. Kent snaps a picture of him and posts it on Instagram from the plane’s wifi, captioning it _rookie thinks he’s all grown up._ Ando gives him the finger and Kent takes a picture of that, too. “Aw, come on, bro,” Ando moans, when Kent makes a threatening motion towards his phone, “are you still jacked about that time I posted you missing your mouth?”

“Maybe,” Kent retorts, and posts it. _Kids are so cute when they’re angry._

Kent turns back to his phone, the ambient noise of the plane now in a markedly different tone. He’s got a text from Alexei he hasn’t answered yet, and Kent looks at it again.

 _I’m telling Jack,_ it says. _Sorry if you are angry. Better he’s knowing than trying to fight you again. I’m too angry, maybe yelling a little._

He doesn’t know what to tell him, but Kent has learned the hard way that silence is the worst kind of answer. _It’s okay. We talked after. Your place for naps tomorrow?_ Then he taps out _thank you_ before he can talk himself out of it. 

Kent doesn’t know what Alexei told him and part of him is afraid to ask, but not so afraid that he wants to face the day in Providence without seeing him. 

Alexei picks him up at their hotel the day of the game and Kent climbs right in, no longer bothering to care who sees. It’s awkward to hug him, twisted sideways in the front seat, but they manage. Alexei smells like warm gold beneath his sweater, a scent so specific and so unique that Kent is startled by how good it feels to recognise it.

Alexei’s couch is plenty long enough for someone to sleep on it, but he just motions Kent to the bed without a question and climbs in next to him. “I’m afraid you’re mad,” Alexei says, beard tickling the back of Kent’s neck. “You are mad?”

“No,” Kent says, rolling over to face him, tracking the small movements of Alexei’s face in the sliver of afternoon light his blackout curtains haven’t managed to keep out. “No. Whatever you told him, we-- He found me after. It’s the most we’ve talked in years.” Kent swallows back the shame that still catches his throat when he thinks about all the mistakes he and Jack have made between them, and how desperately he doesn’t want to make them again. “Jack and I-- we played Juniors together, but…”

“He’s telling me some, too,” Alexei says, when Kent falters. “But I’m wanting to hear from you. If you will say.”

“Fuck,” Kent says, closing his eyes, shuddering when Alexei’s large, warm hand lands on his hip under the covers, drawing him closer. “Fuck, I loved him so much,” Kent says to the blank space between them, the colours behind his eyes sparking with how hard he’s holding them shut. “I think he-- he just stopped talking to me after, and I never knew why. He was never into drugs, the rumours weren’t true, but he did take… I found him. I called the ambulance. I think he blames me for it but I-- I went to his college, did he tell you that? To ask him to sign with us instead of you. I said some really, really shitty things, but I just couldn’t… the way he looked at me like I was a stranger-- I wanted to hurt him too. I fucked up, and then when I came out, with all the things people were saying about me and about him, I guess we were both just too angry to talk.” Kent drags in a breath, chest tight, and opens his eyes. Alexei is looking at him, and hasn’t pulled away. “He was the first person I ever felt like myself with. And then he was just… gone.”

Alexei says nothing for long enough that Kent thinks: _this is it._

Then Alexei cups a hand around the back of Kent’s head and draws him forward, moving to meet him. He presses his lips to Kent’s forehead, brief and careful, before he draws back, leaving his hand where it is. “Is a hard secret for keeping,” he says. “Is very hard to love someone who is not loving you back.”

Kent breathes out, and Alexei lets go. There are so many things Kent wants to tell him and so much he wants to ask him: how did you stay so good? How do you know? How come you’re doing all this for me when you’ve lost your family for it? Do you still think I’m worth it? But in the end he just curls into the warmth of a shared bed and falls asleep. This time Alexei’s snoring doesn’t keep him awake.

When they head back to the rink, Kent stops Alexei with a hand on his arm before he gets out of the car. Before he can talk himself out of it, he curls a knee into the seat, leans over and kisses him, chaste and quick. “For luck,” he says, before they have to go face each other on the ice again.

Kent doesn’t play the best game of his life, but it’s okay. The rest of his team does, and when he faces off against Jack, Jack doesn’t avoid his eyes.

Kent gives the assist for the only goal of the game, when Skoller skips the puck in off Kent’s bounced attempt from behind the net. 

Alexei bumps him lightly as they’re skating off, and whispers, “too much luck, I’m thinking,” with a quick, light punch to his shoulder. “Tomorrow you give some back.”

-

The Falconers win the next one, but that means another game, and it means the Falconers will have to come back to Las Vegas for it.

They’re all exhausted, strung out, thin and drawn and down to reserves. 

Now when they sleep, Kent drops off right away, nothing in his body left for anything else. He’s getting used to the rhythms of Alexei’s body, the way he sleeps and the way he wakes, and the way he looks at Kent sometimes when he thinks Kent isn’t paying attention.

Kent thinks he might be a little twisted for how happy he is that the finals have stretched out so long, when he’s so tired he can hardly concentrate on anything but hockey and trying to keep his team together and ready to play.

The Aces win game five in front of a home crowd, which sends them back to Providence.

Kent isn’t even up to making excuses for where he’s going, and has stopped caring who might see. He knows there have been pictures of them taken by the ever-present opportunists who hang out around the hotels -- not fans hoping for selfies which Kent is pretty happy to stop for -- but the ones who stand back with zoom lenses, hoping for scandal. He knows there’s talk. He knows all about it, but he can’t manage to force himself to care. He’s playing good hockey. His team is playing good hockey, and Kent is so proud of them he thinks he might burst sometimes.

It’s just not enough to stop him from collapsing into Alexei’s bed in Providence, to sink into the soft, dove-grey sheets that always smell freshly washed and wake up tangled in Alexei’s long limbs, listening to his heartbeat through the thin fabric of the t-shirt he always sleeps in, even in the oncoming early-summer heat.

The irony is that the night Kent plays what might be the best playoff hockey of his life with two goals and an assist on the board, the Falconers still take game six.

-

The morning of the final Kent is up before his alarm. He lays in bed for a while, Kit purring heavily against his chest, and Kent think about where he was a year ago. Last June Adam was still alive, just back from a tour in Afghanistan and disinterested in Kent’s life of awkward pictures with well-meaning fans, of speculation every time he was seen speaking to a woman, of getting paid far too much money to play a game.

Last June Kent hadn’t spoken to his dad for almost a month, since they got knocked out of the playoff in the first round. Last June Kent had decided just to spend the summer training in Las Vegas, where the heat was dry and the bars were crowded with strangers and tourists and people willing to have a good time without much of the ‘time’ part. Last June Kent had stalked Jack on the internet sometimes, and texted with one of the frat guys he’d met at their party that had given him his number.

Last June he had found out Jack was dating someone and just turned his phone off for the rest of the day and gone out on the strip, winning as many hands of cards as he could get away with before taking someone upstairs and asking them not to be gentle. 

So much has changed. Adam is gone, and Kent hadn’t realised, even when he died, that it would never stop hurting. He thinks maybe it’s something that gets lighter to bear only once you’re used to the load, but it makes it easier to remember that he might not have liked him much but he didn’t hate him either. It makes it easier to remember the time before they grew into themselves, disparate as they were, when they’d skip school to go play shinny and when Adam would hoard his halloween candy and tell Kent the hiding place anyway.

Last June Kent had only ever met Alexei Mashkov as someone distant and professional, always encircled in a knot of other Russians during international play or with teammates on the road.

Kit licks him, rough tongue pulling against the grain of his beard, and Kent laughs, scratches her under the chin until she decides she’s had enough, then gets up to play some hockey.

-

By mutual agreement Kent and Alexei stay with their teams this time. Kent doesn’t get the kind of sleep he really wants, but it’s okay. For better or worse Kent walks into the locker room that evening and stands up in front of his team, and all he can think of to say is: “Thank you. This has been the best season of my life and it’s down to you assholes. Let’s finish it.”

They skate out, and then it’s time. Kent settles in across from Jack for the first play, wrist a dull ache under the tape as he tightens his grip on his stick, hips protesting as he drops lower.

“Break a leg,” Jack says, with a flash of mouthguard, then the puck drops, and every nerve in his protesting body lights up at once. 

It’s fine for the first period, and the second, but there isn’t a score on the board yet when they get into the third. Swoops is blocking shots as though his life depends on it but so is Snow, and the Falconers’ defense is tighter than it’s ever been tonight, Alexei playing with the kind of single-minded focus and determination that Kent knows intimately. He should be furious. He is, on one level; furious that they’re not getting through, furious that now, in the last hour, when it matters, his grip on his stick is slipping when it shouldn’t. But at the same time, when Alexei finally catches up to him to check him off the puck, it feels right somehow, that they’ve had to fight it right down to the wire, that Kent has had to grind himself down so far to do it.

It still doesn’t make it better when, with less than a minute to go, one of the guys on the Falconers’ second line picks up the puck from Kent, clips it back towards the Aces’ goal, and the only person there to catch it is Alexei, out of position but ready, who seems to almost flick it in in slow motion, then drops his stick in disbelief.

The buzzer sounds, and there’s a moment of deafening silence before the crowd erupts, and before Kent finds himself in the center of his team, enveloped, insulated, carried along in a haze of unbelievable defeat.

It feels as though someone has reached into him and scraped out his organs. He’d really thought they were going to do it. Even the murmured condolences of Ando and Swoops, pressed into him on either side as though to hold him up, barely register. Kent thinks, with startling, awful clarity, about all the people he’s let down, his _team,_ who’ve put up with a mountain of bullshit for and from him without a word of complaint, and who deserve better. Kent thinks of and all the people who will tell each other they knew it, that he’s lost his edge, and worse. Kent thinks about his dad, who will have to hear about it from near-strangers who think they can say anything they want just because Kent made himself a spectacle, but then he catches sight of Alexei.

His big eyes are coin-round with surprise, but instead of celebrating with his team he’s disengaging, skating over, evidently intending to be the first in line for handshakes. He takes out his mouthguard, draws his bottom lip between his teeth, and looks right at Kent.

Kent lives in a space occupied by violence more often than he likes to think about. It’s the nature of the game and the nature of the world. His body is the testament to that, tape tight on his hands and fingers, breath coming hard and fast even a minute after the end, but so is he, the entirety of his being on display a giant fuck-you in Vegas neon. There isn’t a single thing about this that he hasn’t had to fight for, so when Alexei looks at him, Kent smiles at him. Maybe someone takes a picture, but Kent refuses to care. Alexei doesn’t seem to care that he’s scored the series-winning goal, so why should Kent care if anyone sees him looking out from the ranks of his team and smiling at the single person who has made him feel as though all this is worth it, that every daily fight has a purpose besides Kent’s own.

So when Alexei starts the handshake line instead of the Falconers’ captain and drops his helmet and his gloves without looking to see where they land Kent rushes to follow. Kent wants to feel him under his sore palms and against his sweat-soaked cheek and to tell him he’s proud of him, even though it hurts.

It’s almost not a surprise when Alexei seizes him with two hands cupped under his jaw and kisses him in front of thousands of people as though they don’t exist, and Kent is the only source of air in the room.

-

Kent has never prepped a speech for the Stanley Cup. The first time, Kent was a rookie --the dream of every single kid getting into the NHL, winning right out of the gate-- and nobody had been more surprised than him, even though he was the Calder winner that year and the only rookie to win the Conn Smythe in about forty years.

He’d had a microphone in his face and nothing to say, relief cresting over him in a wave. He must have uttered something, but to this day he doesn’t remember what it was. No doubt it was inarticulate. There are still photos of him grinning and nearly speechless, face burnished with his embarrassing just-nineteen-year-old red-gold scruff. Even since, he has never prepped a single thing to say, win or lose, no matter how infuriating the press and the GM might find it.

This time, crushed into the locker room with his team, his guys, who fought harder than even he had expected them to, the words are coming easily, genuine and a little angry; he’s facing down a row of mics and a semicircle of not-quite-hostile faces who aren’t asking him how it feels to lose in his historic season, or how it feels to be the only player to win the Conn Smythe who hasn’t actually won the Stanley Cup since 2003.

They’re asking him about Alexei, and he can still feel the heat of Alexei’s lips on his, and the rasp of his huge beard against Kent’s own gingery monstrosity, and he wants nothing more than to go back onto the ice and hold his head up and do it again.

“I’m not going to answer that,” he says, looking over the line of cameras to where the Aces are clustered, waiting, if they aren’t being mobbed by their own scrums. “I’m going to answer the questions you’re not asking, because I have something I want to say. We played a hell of a series, and I think the fact that we’ve fought it out to seven games shows how well we pulled together as a team. And before you go congratulate the winners--” he breaks off, forcing a breath “--I want it on record that I’ve never been prouder to be an Ace than I am right this second.”

He looks around to see if they’re listening, and spots Ando and Mary and Swoops shushing others, crowding in behind the reporters. Kent looks over the crowd and carries on, pushing past the lump in his throat. “I’ve never been prouder to call these guys my friends, and I-- I’ve read some of the things that have been printed about me this year and I want to say something about that, too.” He looks down at his hands and clenches a fist, pain shooting up his wrist and into his elbow, and thinks _here goes._ “I’m not a different player or a different captain from last time we took the Stanley Cup home. What I am-- I think I’m a better person and a better teammate because I’m not hiding from my team. ” 

He pauses, exhaustion of the last few hours pulling at him, pain slowing his words. Someone starts to yell a question, and Kent is jolted back to action. “I’m not finished,” he says, all in a rush. “What I really want to say is that I’m right here, and I’ve been right here for years. Right in front of you. And I’m not going anywhere, no matter what you write about me tonight. I’m not-- I can’t make a call for anyone else to do what I’ve done, because in a lot of ways this has also been the worst year of my life. But I did it and the sky didn’t fall. We almost won the Stanley Cup.” He chokes back the panic that hits him in the dead silence, looks at the sea of stunned faces pointing mics and cameras in the split second before the yelling starts and stares them down. “Nothing anyone has said or done or thought about me has made me regret being the first.”

The room descends into chaos, and Kent hears a few people yelling “what about Mashkov!” but Kent refuses to answer a single one. He’s said his piece and so he starts to change, pulling pieces of his armour off at his own pace until the rest of the Aces crowd in around him. They’re a body shield of sweat and muscle and atrocious beards, and if Kent starts leaking exhausted tears into his hands once they’ve pushed the press out, not a single one of the mass of his friends --gripping him by the shoulder, the arm, resting palms on the top of his soaked head-- is ever going to say a word about it.

-

If there are such things as hockey gods, the one that governs rivalry is furious that night because the Aces and the Falconers go out together.

The second Kent sees Alexei he wants nothing more than to cling to him and never let go. He resists, because Alexei is surrounded by Falconers, including a dazed-looking Jack. Kent should take back all the things he said about Jack’s choice of team when he was a free agent and he should congratulate the winners, but right then he just wants everyone between him and Alexei to get out of the way. 

Alexei spots him and stops talking mid-sentence, hands frozen in the air for an instant before he excuses himself from the knot of his team-mates and makes a beeline for Kent.

Kent is long past pretending at dignity. He lost that somewhere around the time Ando had asked if Kent bet on himself kissing Alexei in front of everyone live on television to skew the pool. He throws his arms around Alexei’s chest, pressing his face to the expensive fabric of Alexei’s shirt; he smells like cotton and sweat and sun-warmed metal and Kent almost loses it again when Alexei pulls him tighter.

He thinks, for a vanishing instant, he might be a horrible human being for getting yet another person involved in his life only for them to find out the hard way how shitty that tends to be, but then he remembers Alexei’s dropped gloves, his hands cupping his jaw, and the slow, deliberate press of the kiss, right there on the ice. Kent feels as though he’s been warm for a year. “Fuck, I’m so proud of you,” Kent murmurs into his chest. “I can’t believe it.” 

“I’m telling you we win,” Alexei rumbles, lips brushing Kent’s stale hair.

“Yeah, you did.” 

“You take me home tonight, yes?”

Kent nods against him, unable to force any more words out before he reaches up and catches the back of Alexei’s neck, fingers curling into where his hair has grown too long at the back, shaggy and fine and perfect. He draws Alexei down for another kiss, slower this time but just as good. Just as much of a declaration, even if it’s just between the two of them, two bodies that shouldn’t fit together but do, somehow.

They stay at the party long enough for Alexei to be in all the pictures with the Falconers; he lifts the cup and wears it as a hat, then they all try to lift Jack and put him in it, to recreate his first ever picture with it as an infant. Kent even manages to laugh, watching.

It’s not his victory, but it doesn’t matter. Tomorrow he can be mad about the loss, but tonight he feels just too relieved, and just too perfectly exhausted. His entire body aches, and tomorrow he will have to make a plan for how to deal with his wrist over the summer, but for now Kent is finely-tuned to Alexei, watching him celebrate without quite wanting to interrupt. His team-mates are embracing him, and he looks delirious with it. Kent hopes it lasts. He deserves some joy, and if this is what it takes Kent won’t begrudge him a victory. It’s new, this feeling, but at the same time it isn’t. It’s familiar, like an old blanket, or the weight of an arm across his shoulders.

When Alexei slips away from the crowd Kent already has his car keys in hand, and then they’re driving home, Alexei pushing the front seat as far back as it will go and drumming his fingers up his thighs in time with the music.

Kent feels as though he’s been waiting for this for so much longer than just a hockey season. When Kent was a kid and it was Jack next to him he could barely think, desperation and hope and lust drowning out everything else, but Kent has ten years on that kid now. He thinks about what he’d tell himself, if he could go back in time. He doesn’t know, and doesn’t think he ever will. There’s no changing the past. It’s a foreign country once visited, or a hometown that’s never quite the same. The place hasn’t changed, but the traveller has. 

Now, Kent gets to look and actually see: Alexei’s long neck taut and bare as he rests the back of his head against the headrest, humming quietly and looking out the window. A glint of gold where the chain he never takes off catches the light. Alexei’s slow, easy smile when he catches Kent looking. “Eyes on the road,” he chides gently, cracking the window to let in the wind. “I’m too lucky tonight for accident.”

Kent parks badly and doesn’t care, fumbling his keys into the lock and sidestepping Kit, who rams into Alexei instead. His booming laugh carries them all the way up the stairs. Kent can’t remember if he locked the door and decides it doesn’t matter.

Nothing matters except for the broad roughness of Alexei’s hands sliding under the hem of Kent’s shirt, expertly coaxing open the buttons and sliding the sleeves down Kent’s arms. Kent shudders when Alexei lifts his wrist and presses a kiss to the underside, to the lingering heat of strain insistent but entirely subsumed by the gentleness of Alexei’s touch. Alexei moves on to his belt, his zipper, the rest of it, Kent divests himself of shoes with his toes, leaning against Alexei’s solid weight for balance. He laughs a little, breaking the silence, and then it’s as though he can’t stop smiling, jubilant and exhausted and so hard he aches all over.

Kent presses up on the balls of his feet as far as he can reach, and Alexei bends down to meet him, hands resting on Kent’s bare waist, thumbs brushing into the creases by his hips where the flesh has been swept away by the season. He presses into the sinew, and then he lifts Kent bodily and lowers him onto the bed. “Oh,” Kent manages, “I’m definitely making you do that again.”

Alexei grins at him and makes short work of his clothes, ungainly and overlong, and then Kent can see how mutual this is, how paradoxically shy Alexei gets when Kent touches him in return. Kent can’t resist touching him all over, as much as he can reach, dragging his fingertips through the thick, dark hair spread across Alexei’s chest, descending, leading his unhurried hands towards Alexei’s hips. Kent wraps his left had around him, drawing a shuddering gasp before Alexei gently pushes his hand away. 

Kent, confused, is about to ask what’s wrong when Alexei presses him down by the shoulders with gentle but insistent force, sliding himself against Kent’s side. Kent thinks if he were to push back he’d get nowhere, Alexei’s sheer size enough to keep him still. Alexei seems like he’s in no rush, but Kent has been waiting for this for months, stopping himself from thinking about it, daring himself not to wonder. “Are you okay?” he asks, covering Alexei’s hand on his clavicle with his own, feeling the high bones under chapped skin as though reading braille.

“Has been very long time,” Alexei says, close and warm and hard against him. “Maybe I’m wanting to look.”

Kent smothers a laugh, nearly vibrating with readiness, every part of him that’s untouched clamouring for attention. “How about you look after? If I have to wait any longer I might explode, and that would be just-- mess, everywhere.”

Alexei’s smile spreads slowly across his face, and his hand presses down just a fraction harder. Not hard enough to hurt but enough that Kent gasps, mindless. “Is looking like I could make you wait,” Alexei says happily, before he slides a leg over Kent’s hips and positions himself on top, pinning him to the mattress.

Kent thinks, before he loses the ability to do so, that he couldn’t have asked for anything better. Nothing could possibly beat this, Alexei’s casual competitiveness clicking perfectly with Kent’s own nagging need to push back, push back, push back.

Kent does, working for leverage until he can fist his left hand in Alexei’s hair and drag him down, kissing him until Alexei is shaking, braced above him but at his mercy somehow, making small, desperate noises between breaths. “What was that?” Kent asks him, nipping at his earlobe as he whispers in his ear.

“You win,” Alexei manages, pushing back, throwing Kent’s knees over his shoulders and swallowing him as far as he can.

Kent isn’t expecting it. The sensation slams into him like a hit straight into the boards, jolting up his spine and bursting across the back of his eyes as he screws them shut and arches off the bed.

He can feel Alexei’s soundless laugh all the way down to the soles of his feet. Kent is electrified, lit up like a firework, and when Alexei pulls off and asks him where he keeps his things, Kent can only wordlessly flop an arm towards his dresser.

Alexei tosses the bottle on Kent’s chest with a little smile before he rips a condom packet open with his teeth, and Kent takes the hint, surprised but delighted, ready for the challenge. It’s been a long time since Kent did this himself but he manages left-handed, too ready even to be embarrassed at how Alexei is watching him, coming to rest on his heels with his thighs spread wide, resting a hand on Kent’s stomach. He looks almost alien for an instant, the way his eyes are glassy and wide, his lips parted to show teeth, but then he’s moving, hauling Kent bodily up until they find the right angle and he slides in.

Kent loses the thread after that, caught in the slick slide of skin on skin and then the wonderful dart of pleasure, reduced to sensation such that when Alexei loses the rhythm Kent whines, wordless. Alexei kisses him once, quick and breathless, his body long enough to reach with no effort, curling in towards Kent. Then with one quick motion he finally touches Kent the way he’s been longing for, big hand wrapped all the way around him, and pulls him over the edge. Kent barely notices Alexei sinking teeth into the curve of his shoulder, only the delicious sting of it as he releases the bite bringing him back to a semblance of lucidity.

Alexei rolls on to his back, breathing hard and turns his face away. Kent reaches out and tips him back by the chin, spreading his palm across Alexei’s prickly cheek. His eyes are wet, eyelashes clinging together in thick spikes. Kent’s heart, already too full, leaps into his throat. “Hey,” Kent says, lost but ready, “I’m right here. So’re you.”

Alexei laughs, blinking furiously, and pulls Kent to him, angle awkward and perfect and better than anything Kent could have conjured if he’d ever let himself imagine this. 

-

After, Kent thinks about all the things he wants to do.

He wants to explore every inch of him, every smooth line and hidden corner. The space between his fingers. The vulnerable strip of skin just above the base of his spine, the unprotected promontories of his ankles. More, though, he thinks about what he wants to do with him, both of them together. Images crowd in on him, a rush of what-ifs Kent is finally glad to wonder about. Alexei in the summer, browned and easy in the canyon. The two of them stealing days here and there with no subterfuge and no need for explanation. 

Kent knows it won’t be easy. He can already picture the travelling, the media circus, the inevitable list of demands they’ll have to decide on how to answer. But Kent can also see the other things: the slow mornings, the easy kisses, the intimacy of trusting someone with his body, his mind, his secrets. He can picture the fights, the negotiations, the compromises.

He imagines all the peaks and pitfalls of building a life with someone and discovers that he wants it all. Kent's a competitive bastard to the last. He’s willing to work for it. And in the end, it’s worth it for just this, Alexei sleeping beside him, easy in his bed.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know shit about hockey. Knifeshoes and murderpucks? Do the thing, win the points. 
> 
> WELL, IT'S FINISHED. I need to lay the wreath of gratitude eternally at the feet of [csoru](http://csoru.tumblr.com/), without whom this last chapter would be a typo-ridden, oddly-paced mess, and whose enthusiasm despite not caring even slightly about Check Please or hockey was a balm and a joy. 
> 
> I want to thank The Instigators, Lanyon and Donya, for making this a thing, talking me through moral dilemmas and guiding me on the finer points of ice golf. All remaining mistakes due to lazy googling. Last but not least I want to thank you lot, who have been tremendous. I'm very grateful to everyone who's taken the time to read along. It's been wild.
> 
> Find me on tumblr [here](http://febricant.tumblr.com/post/154633383342/he-comes-out-on-a-september-morning-of-no) if you're into that sort of thing. Link leads directly to the fic post, so if you want to give it a reblog it's always appreciated!
> 
> PS If anyone wants to write in this universe please feel free. Transformative works for all.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] kick on the starter](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11713014) by [attendtothebones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/attendtothebones/pseuds/attendtothebones)




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